I use VS Code as my main code editor for my C++ development. I am using the remote SSH extension by Microsoft to access my office workstation from home. For the C++ autocompletion and linting I use the clangd extension by LLVM. Company policy prevents users from having sudo access to workstations and libraries are often not at the latest version.
When I try to launch clangd I get the following error message:
/lib64/libstdc++.so.6: version `GLIBCXX_3.4.22' not found (required by /my/path/to/clangd)
Which obviously means that the version of libstdc++ is too old for the version of clangd that I am using. This is easily fixable by adding to LD_LIBRARY_PATH the location of most recent gcc libraries (part of our compiler toolchain) and then launching VS Code.
However, now that I am working remotely I cannot do that because VS Code is installed onto my laptop and I am using the SSH extension to access the code on my office workstation. Looking on the man page for clangd I cannot see a way to specify the path to the libstdc++ that I want to use. Is there a way, other than adding the libraries to the LD_LIBRARY_PATH upon startup/login, to bypass this issue?
I found a way, albeit a little bit hacky.
Export the new LD_LIBRARY_PATH on .zprofile (or equivalent for your shell. I am using zsh). Make sure that there are no VSCode servers running in the host. If there are, make sure to remove them.
In the settings.json file add the following line, to tell VSCode that you want the shell to be a login, interactive shell:
"terminal.integrated.shellArgs.linux": ["-l", "-i"]
Job done. Clangd now finds the correct libraries.