[Qt-creator] Clang-Tidy Integration Decision (4.10 & 4.12 usability)

[Michael Jackson]

Back in the QtCreator 4.10 days there was "automatic" clang-tidy/clazy integration. The downside was that opening a source file would cause a lag (sometimes long depending on the age of the computer) to get the method/function list and code navigation to show up. The upside is that the annotations were marked in the editor along the right side and also in the scroll well area. They were easy to see with the human eye and hard to miss. BUT QtCreator 4.10 had a big bad issue on macOS Catalina with the latest Xcode, debugging  caused the CPU to burn 100% even when sitting at a break point. 

Then we jumped to QtCreator 4.12 RC/Beta and now the debugging issue is solved BUT now clang-tidy doesn't run automatically anymore. When I searched out how to get it to run I have to run it manually (ok, maybe a fair trade off) but the annotations are effectively "hidden" now down the left side of the editor marked by a little triangle icon. There doesn't seem to be a way to go back to old style of putting them on the right side of the editor and in the scroll well. I am now missing clang-tidy warnings because there isn't a list anywhere to go by. The clang-tidy process seems to fail because of some ITK header that says it does not recognize the compiler. This didn't used to happen.

So now I have a decision to make. Stick with 4.10.x but have a noisy laptop (the fans spin at 100%) but have really nice automatic clang-tidy warnings that are easy to "see" and therefor parse OR go with 4.12 where the debugging is now quiet but the clang-tidy annotations are effectively hidden to the developer, or at least non-obvious.

My assumption is that if the developer finds it important enough to turn on the clang-tidy warnings they I would assume that they want to easily "see" and grok those warnings. 

Just my 2 cents.

--
Michael Jackson | Owner, President
      BlueQuartz Software
[e] mike.jackson at bluequartz.net
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