cpplint or cpplint.py is an open source lint-like tool developed by Google, designed to ensure that C++ code conforms to Google's coding style guides.
Therefore cpplint implements what Google considers to be "best practices" in C++ coding. The script cpplint.py reads source code files and flags deviations from the style guide. It also identifies syntax errors. It is rules based, and uses a number of heuristics to identify bad code.
cpplint.py suffers from both false positives and false negatives. False positives can be eliminated by tagging lines with // NOLINT (or // NOLINT(rule) to suppress only the incriminated rule category).
Moreover rules can be fine-grained selected using the options --verbose and --filter. Line length rule can be configured with option --linelength and file extensions can be configured with --extensions (by default: 'h', 'cpp', 'cc', 'cu' and 'cuh'). Some options can be stored in a configuration file CPPLINT.cfg.
cpplint is implemented as a Python script. It is distributed under the 3 clause BSD license.