Google releases its own Javascript Lint tool (opens in new tab)

(closuretools.blogspot.com)

115 pointsedd15y ago15 comments

15 comments

14 comments · 6 top-level

thechangelog15y ago· 4 in thread

Does anyone know how this would differ from jslint? I couldn't find anything immediately obvious.

maw15y ago

It gives you a different set of ridiculous warnings about things that have nothing to do with your code's correctness.

Ha ha, only serious

But for real there are many warnings that pretty plainly seem to be about enforcing somebody's preferences -- gjslint wants you to write "function()" but jslint wants you to write "function ()", for example. Enforcing conventions is good, but I'm pretty sure it's orthogonal to flagging real, common problems (in javascript land, things such missing "var" or ";")

Using both and suppressing the stupid warnings doesn't seem like a bad idea, if you can take the time to get it right.

btilly15y ago

In the example they gave, they had 9 errors. 1 was something that leads to browser incompatibility. (Trailing comma at the end of the array. IE doesn't implement the spec, Firefox does.) 1 was something that often points to logic errors. (Inconsistent indentation.) And the other 7 were someone's idea of correct style.

That said, I suspect that this lint tool will catch some issues where technically correct code can make http://code.google.com/closure/compiler/ unhappy. If you're using the Closure library, that's kind of the whole point.

thezilch15y ago

Note: It would appear the coding-style assertions can be attributed to the "--strict" flag, used in the example.

YMMV, but I get the above impression from the docs (How To) -- http://code.google.com/closure/utilities/docs/linter_howto.h...

warp15y ago

A very important difference for me is that jslint is not under a GPL-compatible license. jslint looks like open source, but isn't.

Closure Linter is under Apache v2, which is GPLv3 compatible.

maw15y ago· 2 in thread

The installation instructions tell you to run "easy_install http://closure-linter.googlecode.com/files/closure_linter-la.... All well and good, but install instructions that don't reference specific version numbers freak me out. I might have gotten a little too much reproducibility religion, with all that that entails, but it seems better than being so cavalier when setting up environments.

rquirk15y ago

I'm not sure what easy_install does exactly, but I guess you could replace latest with a version number. On http://code.google.com/p/closure-linter/downloads/ there's a 2.2.1 there, so instead of using "latest", you could use "2.2.1". If you care enough about this, then you probably could do some digging. Having a "latest" means they don't have to update the instructions every release, and for most people this will Just Work.

prodigal_erik15y ago

easy_install is yet another single-language package manager. It doesn't interop with the legitimate OS package manager's database of installed dependencies, and your admins probably have very little experience with it. Best to run it on one sacrificial box and then turn whatever it leaves behind into a real RPM package (or whatever your platform wants).

1 more reply

kilian15y ago· 2 in thread

Ouch, they shipped with a broken fixjsstyle command: http://groups.google.com/group/closure-linter-discuss/browse... Luckily it didn't break my jsfile, but that's kind of clumsy.

acdha15y ago

After fixing that, I ran into an even more surprising error which someone had already reported - turns out a simple JavaScript closure chokes it:

(function() {})();

http://code.google.com/p/closure-linter/issues/detail?id=3

Hovertruck15y ago

I remember running into this issue with their minifier at some point as well.

stevelosh15y ago

Here's a couple of lines to let you use this with :make (on a single file) and the QuickFix window in Vim:

    au BufNewFile,BufRead *.js set makeprg=gjslint\ %
    au BufNewFile,BufRead *.js set errorformat=%-P-----\ FILE\ \ :\ \ %f\ -----,Line\ %l\\,\ E:%n:\ %m,%-Q,%-GFound\ %s,%-GSome\ %s,%-Gfixjsstyle%s,%-Gscript\ can\ %s,%-G

If any experts in Vim's makeprg/errorformat want to clean this up, that would be awesome. I just hacked it together and it seems to work well enough.

kilowatt15y ago

I was hoping I could run this realtime in vim, but it appears too slow on a 1000 line JS file.

eclark15y ago

It fails on file I have thrown at it with some complexity other than jquery.

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