Therefore cpplint implements what Google considers best practices in C++ coding. The script cpplint.py reads source code files and flags deviations from the style guide. It also identifies syntax errors. It is rules based, and uses a number of heuristics to identify bad code.[1]
Cpplint is not perfect, as it can suffer from occasional false positives and negatives. Nevertheless, it is still a very useful tool for style enforcement.[2]
Moreover rules can be fine-grained selected using the options --verbose and --filter.
Line length rule can be configured with option --linelength
and file extensions can be configured with --extensions (by default: 'h', 'cpp', 'cc', 'cu' and 'cuh').
Some options can be stored in a configuration file CPPLINT.cfg.