IntelliSense Parse Directory Exclusions

[MikeGameDev]

Type: LanguageService
C/C++

Describe the bug

• OS and Version: Windows 10 RS4
• VS Code Version: 1.24.1
• C/C++ Extension Version: 0.17.5
• Other extensions you installed (and if the issue persists after disabling them): None
• A clear and concise description of what the bug is:

IntelliSense seems to parse every folder within a workspace without any regard for the "files.exclude" workspace setting. This leads to very long parse times as it seems that IntelliSense tries to parse unnecessary files.

Expected behavior
IntelliSense should not attempt to parse files in excluded directories.

[sean-mcmanus]

Hmm...we are supposed to look at files.exclude. Can you provide more info? Are you excluding certain folders? How do you know those excluded folders are being parsed? Are you opening files in those excluded folders? Are you using WSL? Are you using recursive includes? If you set the C_Cpp.loggingLevel to "Debug" you can see which files we are parsing, although you may need to do a Reset IntelliSense Database command if all the files are already parsed. We bypass file-based exclusions unless C_Cpp.exclusionPolicy is set to checkFilesAndFolders (due to performance issues).

[canfoderiskii]

Hi, @sean-mcmanus

Really need this feature!

Here is my example:

The image below shows I excluded a few unrelated platform's header files, leaving only one platform header file(see side bar on left side).

All those platform header files have symbol GPIO_TypeDef and this symbol is commonly used in my code.
When I press F12 trying to Go to Definition for that symbol, the edior lists all the definitions including those platforms which are expected to be excluded. See the screenshot blow.

[sean-mcmanus]

@canfoderiskii It looks like you're using file-based exclusions. Does setting the C_Cpp.exclusionPolicy to "checkFilesAndFolders" fix the issue for you? FYI, having a long list of file exclusions will slow down our operations because it's expensive to run the exclusion checking for every file. We're currently working on IntelliSense-based Go to Def, which should fix the "too many incorrect" results behavior -- assuming IntelliSense-based hover shows only 1 result with your scenario. I wasn't able to repro the original issue reported.

[canfoderiskii]

Hi, @sean-mcmanus

My bad, I missed C_Cpp.checkFilesAndFolders earlier. This configuration actually works.

Is there any suggestion for avoiding adding too many file exclusion in my scenario? There are various platforms' code in the same directory and I have to exclude most of them.

[sean-mcmanus]

@canfoderiskii Well, if you can do something to only exclude folders that would be preferred -- we just use the checkFolders default so the initial Open Folder experience is faster (and is sufficient for most projects). However, the only code that has its performance affected is when it says "Discovering files: " over the database icon in the bottom right, which may be fast enough if your workspace isn't too large -- that processing just looks for new/modified files to add to our database, so if the files are already in our symbol database from a previous activation of our extension, then the speed of that operation doesn't matter -- i.e. only newly added/modified files that got changed while our extension wasn't running would be have their files/symbols delayed.

[canfoderiskii]

@sean-mcmanus Got it. Thank you for the reply.