Linter doesn't lint (most of the time)

Help Visual Studio Code
1

I’m sorry if this is a bit vague, but I’m not entirely sure which part of the toolchain is failing, so please bear with me.

TL;DR: Linter doesn’t lint (most of the time).

I have Modern Fortran set up in VSCode (actually, VSCodium) on a Windows 10 PC. I inherited a legacy project mostly written in Fixed Form/F77 though includes a bit of F90/F95, and after some initial struggle migrating from another editor, I got everything set up and working correctly in VSC. There are ~700 source files, and is compiled with gfortran with the flags: -g -O0 -Wall -fcheck=bounds. At the time, I was using an old version of gfortran (v8.1.0). At some point recently, I decided to update the compiler to test out some modern Fortran features, so I’ve upgraded to v14.2.0, and this is where my issues began to appear.

I am now finding that the editor will not perform live error linting anymore (as demonstrated in the GIFs on the Modern Fortran extension marketplace page). Now, nothing* gets linted anymore; I can type some random garbage, and no error is revealed during editing (though, of course, the project would not compile for real). The few exceptions are if I SAVE a source file with CERTAIN illegal lines such as open blocks with no end, incl. do, if (only if the line contains then), interface, associate, to name a few that I’ve noticed. In these cases, the linter shows errors in subsequent subroutines/functions. Also, VSCode does detect several “Problems” in old source files that I have never touched (no idea why the project can normally compile with these present, but that’s a separate issue).

I would really like to restore the linting functionality, but I have no idea what change exactly caused this. I upgraded the compiler, like I said, but in the last several weeks have also upgraded fortls, edited VSCode settings, and of course have been updating all VSCode extensions as updates are released. I have tried reverting to the old compiler version, and can’t get it to work now. There have been moments in the past where I managed to get things working again (IIRC), but it was all rather aimless settings tweaking. So I believe the problem here is either a VSCode configuration issue, or some sort of build/compiler issue maybe.

Here are some potentially relevant names/numbers for my setup:

  • OS: Windows 10 (22H2)
  • VSCodium: v1.96.4
  • Modern Fortran extension: v3.4.2024101621 (pre-release)
  • C/C++ extension: v1.23.5
  • Error Lens extension: v3.22.1
  • Last working compiler: gfortran v8.1.0 (i686-8.1.0-win32-dwarf-rt_v6-rev0)
  • Current compiler: gfortran v14.2.0 (i686-14.2.0-win32-dwarf-msvcrt-rt_v12-rev0)
  • FortLS: v3.1.2 (Python v3.11.3)

And some Modern Fortran settings:

  • "C_Cpp.default.compilerPath": "C:\\compiler\\mingw_w64\\i686-14.2.0-win32-dwarf-msvcrt-rt_v12-rev0\\mingw32\\bin\\i686-w64-mingw32-gfortran.exe"
  • "fortran.fortls.path": "C:\\Users\\<username>\\AppData\\Local\\Programs\\Python\\Python311\\Scripts\\fortls.exe"
  • "fortran.linter.compilerPath": "C:\\compiler\\mingw_w64\\i686-14.2.0-win32-dwarf-msvcrt-rt_v12-rev0\\mingw32\\bin\\i686-w64-mingw32-gfortran.exe"
  • "fortran.linter.includePaths": ["${workspaceFolder}/src/incs/**"]
  • "fortran.linter.initialize": true
  • "fortran.linter.modOutput": "${workspaceFolder}/.mod" (though nothing actually generates here, and previous working configs did not have any directory specified here)

Things that I know (think) are working:

  • IntelliSense: I get hover popups, autocomplete suggestions, function signatures, etc.
  • FortLS: Some few files/specific errors ARE linted
  • Pre-initialization: Checking the extension output, I get entries like [build.single] Compiler query command line: <path>-gfortran.exe -fsyntax-only -cpp -ffree-line-length-none -ffixed-line-length-none --include-dirs <dirs> -J <workspace>\.mod -I<workspace>\src\incs -ffixed-form -o <workspace>\src\<...>\<filename>.for.o <workspace>\src\<...>\<filename>.for with no visible errors

Though I may be wrong about what parts do what.

If anyone has a suggestion about what my problem could be and how to solve it, I would really appreciate any input! If I should provide additional info, just let me know.

Edit: I forgot to mention that all these issues are present on my desktop PC only. On a separate laptop, the linting works correctly! However, I’ve checked, and the extensions/settings/compiler paths there seem the same. But perhaps there’s something else I can compare between the two systems.

2

Ok, in classic fashion, I managed to find the problem (this time) soon after typing out a long request for help. My system which was having the issue had (erroneous) extra arguments passed to the linter. In my case, the line in the settings file was "fortran.linter.extraArgs": ["--include-dirs ${workspaceFolder}/src/incs"]. Removing that argument causes the linter to function as normal again.

Hopefully someone else can get something useful out of this post, I guess. Otherwise, a mod can freely delete this thread if they like.

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