TIL: Configuring YCM to allow the restrict keyword in header files

When doing some C development earlier today, I noticed I was getting a very particular error in vim. Given a simple header file like this:

struct Foo {
    int* restrict ptr;
};

YCM would give an error saying [expected_semi_decl_list] Line 2: expected ';' at end of declaration list, even though this is perfectly valid C.

The reason this happened is because my configuration of YCM was using clangd for parsing the code, and there was no .clangd file specifying what types of files were in this project. Because both C and C++ have header files, clangd guessed that the header file was a C++ header file.

C++ doesn't have the restrict keyword, and so it throws the error above. The fix is simple: make a .clangd configuration file at the root of your project, and then tell clangd that we are writing in C. Something like this should do it:

CompileFlags:
  Add: [-xc]