# Clippy (Rust linter)

58 Hacker News commenters recommended Clippy (Rust linter) and 31 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 12 of 13 months.

**Verdict:** Rust's linter catches bugs and poor patterns, auto-fixes many of them, and helps enforce project standards. Some lints have false positives, so not all are on by default.

## Why people recommend it

- Catches bugs and improves code quality (4 comments): "if Cloudflare had run the standard Clippy linter on their Rust code, and taken the results seriously, it would have prevented the issue" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47191696)) "Clippy (and the Rust compiler proper) can provide so much of the concrete iterative feedback an agent needs" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46168321)) "Those warnings and clippy lints are there to improve the quality of the code and to find bugs." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47222925))
- Automatic fixes for many lints (4 comments): ""cargo clippy --fix" for Rust, essentially integrated with its linter. It doesn't fix all lints, however." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47053836)) "I was able to modernize a fairly old project in literal 15 minutes by using Cargo Clippy's fix mode" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47928598)) "cargo clippy —-fix will automatically apply linter fixes or warning fixes when it can." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46514484))
- Enforces standards in CI and projects (4 comments): "Static linting in Rust via clippy also makes it pretty straightforward to begin enforcing things" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48844411)) "I made myself pre commit hooks for running clippy nightly and deploying my standard lints" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47958626)) "Put that in your CI pipeline, and voila. Global crash averted." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46060446))
- Gives coding agents useful feedback (4 comments): "telling it that it has to run clippy as well as tests before it can claim it's finished helped a decent amount" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48114039)) "I can ask the agent to make both the compiler and clippy::pedantic happy. That gives a lot of good feedback" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49788918)) "found that to drastically improve the quality of the code as the LLM now should pass all clippy checks" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48270685))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [Ruff](https://hackerapproved.com/p/ruff.md): 115 recommend
- [ESLint](https://hackerapproved.com/p/eslint.md): 32 recommend
- [Biome](https://hackerapproved.com/p/biome.md): 23 recommend
- [Oxlint](https://hackerapproved.com/p/oxlint.md): 20 recommend
- [ShellCheck](https://hackerapproved.com/p/shellcheck.md): 19 recommend

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "Clippy (Rust linter)", https://hackerapproved.com/p/clippy/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).