[cfe-dev] Almost there...

[AlisdairM(public)]

Hello all - first post!

After finally finding the time to take a proper look at Clang, I've
downloaded the source from SVN and must say I'm impressed at how clean the
code is - I feel I can actually jump in and work out what is happening,
largely by code inspection!  No mean feat.  In fact, I'm inspired to get
involved myself.  Which brings me to problem number 1 ;¬)

Essentially I am stuck on the Windows platform, and following a quick tip
from Doug to look into CMake I spent day installing and hacking at different
build tools and compilers I can *almost* build Clang.

Ultimately, I can't get the MinGW configuration running past autoconf
(configure.guess) - and my best guess is because I am not running a bash
shell and that seems to be what the MinGW config expects.

However I have download VC2008 express and CMake has configured and built
the LLVM project, so no I am trying to build Clang.

The problem here is the CMakeList.txt file in /include/clang/basic.  It
appears to use a 'tablegen' command that is not recognised by my version of
CMake (2.6.4, which I believe is the latest) and I don't know enough about
any of these tools to start looking for a fix.  So far nothing helpful via
google!

Any tips/suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

As for what I thought about contributing...
My main interest is in getting a strong C++0x front end up and running,
although clearly there is some C++98/03 work to happen along the way!  For
early projects I figured I would look at features that can be implemented by
taking the pattern of existing code.

So Unicode characters (char16_t/char32_t) could be implemented by copying
the wchar_t implementation.
Alias declarations are essentially an alternative syntax for typedef
declarations (template variant can be ignored in initial pass)

Other simple looking projects might be raw string literals, and delegating
constructors (if the constructor implementation is mature enough)

Of course, the getting started docs suggest I might be on my own getting the
test cases up and running on Windows - so that should be something of a
priority too!

Thanks in advance for any help,
AlisdairM