[cfe-dev] RFC: Integrating clang-cc functionality into clang (the driver)

[Daniel Dunbar]

2009/12/4 Török Edwin <edwintorok at gmail.com>:
> On 2009-12-04 18:20, Daniel Dunbar wrote:
>> Hello again,
>>
>> All the major pieces of the clang / clang-cc integration project are
>> now in place, which means its time to put them to work! :)
>>
>
> Hi,
>
> So can I now invoke the driver directly (after forking, in case it
> crashes),
> without the need for execve(), and have the ability to turn all the
> clang-cc commandline flags on/off?

Yes. Look at ASTUnit::LoadFromSource for example.

> Is there a way now to get diagnostics directly, without the need to
> redirect/parse the output?

Yes.

> Also will cl::ParseCommandLineOptions still work for LLVM commandline
> options?

It works, but it isn't called by default. We could add an -mllvm for
clang-cc for this, although I'd rather not.

> I am currently using some rather low-level switches for clang-cc, so I
> might as well ask now whether these are going away in the future or not:
> -ffreestanding -nostdinc -disable-free -fdiagnostics-show-option
> -fmessage-length=80
> -fcolor-diagnostics -triple clambc-generic-generic -include bytecode.h
> -Wall -warn-dead-stores  -warn-security-syntactic -analyzer-eagerly-assume
> -v -g -E -S

No, although it would be better for you to use the driver to construct
a CompilerInvocation, and then tweak the resulting object. That way
you are insulated from changes to the clang/clang
-cc1/CompilerInvocation API.

> Also I've been experimenting at some point with writing a simple editor
> that uses clang for syntax highlighting/completion.
> There were 2 issues:
>  - creating the Preprocessor object involved setting lot of language
> related stuff, like implicitint, accesscontrol, bool support, and so on.
> Is there a way to just tell it to create with the language defaults that
> the clang driver would use? (and eventually tell it about
> -std=c99, and it automatically sets up whatever clang sets up for c99).

You can do this easily now via CompilerInvocation and
CompilerInstance. You can look at how the FrontendAction wrapper
implements this, for example.

> - This isn't necesarely related to your driver work, but I didn't see
> any support for reusing previous parse results, like reparsing only the
> portion of the
> file/membuffer that changed. Can that somehow be accomplished with the
> new driver infrastructure? (i.e. tell it that you've previously compiled
> this file
> with same driver, and now you only want to reparse/rebuild the AST for
> the changed part).

This doesn't really have anything to do with the driver, and we don't
have the underlying feature support for this.

It's great to hear someone is working on this kind of stuff, please
consider packing your work up as an example we can include with clang!

 - Daniel

> Best regards,
> --Edwin
>