What's New in CLion 2023.3

JetBrains’ AI Assistant is now generally available with a number of new and improved features to increase your productivity in JetBrains IDEs.

In CLion 2023.3, AI Assistant generates documentation more accurately and can explain runtime errors to you. The latest update also includes a context-aware AI chat and project-aware AI actions that use extended context to provide more comprehensive results.

Use AI Assistant in CLion as an add-on with a JetBrains AI subscription.

In a bid to address long-standing performance and quality issues and unify the user experience across all our C++ tools, we’re launching CLion Nova. It’s a free preview version of CLion with the C++ language engine from ReSharper C++ and JetBrains Rider. It guarantees:

• Faster highlighting speeds
• A more responsive UI
• Significantly fewer freezes and hangs in refactorings
• Faster Find Usages
• Faster test indexing

Learn more and use it for free while in preview

A range of project models are used for C and C++ projects. CLion works out of the box with CMake, compilation databases, Makefiles, and Autotools projects. V2023.3 now brings long-awaited support for Meson and addresses many issues in the Bazel for CLion plugin.

Learn more about the changes

CLion comes with a built-in data flow analyzer, which runs constantly when you are writing your code and helps improve your code’s quality. In v2023.3, we’ve improved the accuracy and performance of the overall analysis and added a memory leak analysis.

Learn more about the new analysis

CLion does its best to help you understand what the code is actually doing and search for bugs in the code base. A new Run to Cursor inlay option speeds up navigation through the code in the debugger, while the Assembly view for files is useful when you’re trying to find a bug or optimize your code’s runtime performance.

Learn more about the new abilities

A device tree is a hierarchical data structure primarily used to describe hardware. It’s widely used in Zephyr and provides the initial configuration for hardware. It’s now much easier to read, navigate, and maintain such files with CLion. Files with .dts and .dtsi extensions are treated by the IDE as device tree files, and so coding assistance options are now available in the device tree.

Learn more about the DTS support

Important quality improvements are implemented in Google’s Bazel plugin for CLion:

• CLion now takes the strip_include_prefix argument into account and thus uses the correct paths when looking for included headers.
• The code insight now works correctly for the symlinked header under Bazel’s virtual includes.
• Projects added in WORKSPACE.bazel using local_repository, or new_local_repository are now synchronized and indexed correctly in CLion.

Meson support comes to CLion! You can open a Meson project in CLion and build, run, and debug it. It works on all platforms and for all local and remote toolchains, including WSL and Docker.

To help you edit the meson.build file, CLion provides you with:

• Code highlighting
• The Structure view shows executables and libraries if executable(...) and library(...) commands are present in the file.

Learn how to work with Meson projects in CLion

The CMake preset conditions equals and notEquals are now supported, meaning CLion no longer shows presets that don't match these conditions.

With CLion 2023.3, you don’t need a debugging session to explore the underlying assembly code! The new Show Assembly action uses the compiler settings from the currently selected resolve configuration, compiles the code of the currently viewed C/C++ file to assembly, and opens an editor with a preview showing which source code produces which assembly.

Learn more

All Assembly views in CLion (with and without the debugging sessions) were enhanced with the ability to switch to x86 assembly (Intel) syntax. To do so, go to Options in the Assembly view window and refresh the view to apply the changes.

Learn more

To write device tree files more effectively, CLion supports:

• Code completion for standard nodes, /<commands>/, and labels.
• Validation for labels and node names as you type.
• Validation for the order of the elements in the tree if it’s defined.
• Array size checks defined by the /bits/ option.

A new “function summaries” approach in CLion 2023.3 allowed us to distinguish different function contexts for arbitrary nested call chains, resulting in more accurate data flow analysis.

Existing inspections in DFA now also consider fields, and there is a new inspection that warns you if not all of the fields were initialized.

Training starts with the onboarding tour, which helps you get acquainted with CLion and the main user activities: navigating through the views and panels, opening files in the editor, launching your program, autocompleting symbols, applying quick-fixes, and searching for symbols.

When you are done with the basics, you can move forward to the Code Editing, Refactorings, Code Completion, and Git sections. You can go through lessons from the list in any order, so just focus on the topics most interesting to you.

To enhance your navigation experience when working with a variety of file types in the editor at the same time, we’ve introduced default color-coded highlighting for editor tabs, mirroring their appearance in the Project tool window.

The Speed search functionality, allowing you to quickly navigate within tool windows and dialogs, is now available via a shortcut. When a tree or list is in focus, you can easily invoke the search from the tool window’s Options menu, by pressing Ctrl+F, or simply by starting to type your query.

If you want to quickly revert CLion’s custom tool window layout to the default one, you can now use Window | Layouts | Default to revert your workspace’s appearance to its default state.

To save time during the test indexing phase, you can manually instruct CLion to look for tests in specific directories. To do this, create a Tests scope, and only the files that are filtered by this scope will be indexed during test indexation.

You can use the Tests scope to filter the Project view and quickly access the test files in your project. Learn more.

In CLion 2023.3, we've significantly extended the support for Dev Containers. You can now easily add extra development tools, runtimes, and libraries using Dev Container Features, simplifying the setup of essential components. We’ve also implemented automatic port forwarding, meaning that any ports the application starts listening to in a Dev Container are seamlessly forwarded. Learn more details here.

CLion 2023.3 introduces a revamped way to review changes. Now, instead of going through each file one by one, you can see all of the modified files from a changeset in a single scrollable frame. This new diff viewer is compatible with GitLab, GitHub, and JetBrains Space reviews.

Expanding the GitLab integration introduced with the CLion 2023.2 release, we’ve added support for GitLab snippets. You can now create public or private snippets directly within the IDE.