include-what-you-use/include-what-you-use

Health v2 · maintenance only

Flags: no_license

Adoption not part of the score

4757 stars · 432 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-29, confidence not recorded

Include What You Use (IWYU) is a Clang-based tool that analyzes #include directives in C and C++ source files. It detects superfluous includes, suggests missing ones, and recommends replacing includes with forward declarations where possible.

Use cases

• remove unused #includes from C++ files
• find missing headers for symbols used in source files
• replace includes with forward declarations
• automatically track and clean up header dependencies
• enforce include hygiene in a large C++ codebase

When to choose

• you maintain a large C or C++ codebase with messy or stale includes
• you want to reduce compile times by eliminating unnecessary headers
• you want automated suggestions for correct includes per symbol usage

When to avoid

• your project does not use C or C++
• you need a tool decoupled from specific Clang versions, since IWYU breaks with Clang updates
• you need fully stable production-grade behavior, as the project describes itself as experimental

Facets

cli-tool · maturity active

linter developer-tools parser developer-tools programming-languages parsers windows cpp cli clang static-analysis c-plus-plus includes code-quality linux macos

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