Building Custom Development Environment Features with the clangd Language Server

clangd, a language server for C/C++/Objective-C developed as part of the LLVM project that brings IDE functionality to any text editor supporting the LSP (Language Server Protocol), has become a reliable and accurate tool for code navigation, autocompletion, refactoring, and diagnostics. But what if you need to customize its behavior or integrate specialized checks depending on the project or the developer’s preferences, yet configuration changes alone are insufficient?

In this talk, we will explore clangd’s functional modules—a powerful yet underutilized and under-documented feature that allows you to extend clangd’s functionality (almost) without modifying its source code.