[cfe-dev] Writing a more robust code generation system

[chris nuernberger]

Hey All,

I have written and for a small amount of time maintained a c++ code
generator at work.  It uses clang to parse a bunch of c++ headers and
writes out metadata objects doing things like:

find properties (things that look like get[name] const, set[name])
find collections (getNb, get) etc.

Basically it writes out c++ meta objects that describe the
"properties" on the interfaces.

I would like to lift the entire system up into .net and use F# to do
the actual AST analyzation and transformation and data dumping.
Really I would like to use F# script to do this, running on top of a
Clang# dll that pairs with a clang dll or shared library.

Basically I have a couple questions.  First off, I do my parsing in a
frontend action.  This action gets a callback every so often when new
c++ class is noticed because I derive from the RecursiveASTVisitor
pattern.

What I would like is an interface that basically takes all the
compiler arguments (include paths, etc) and a set of files and returns
an AST that has been lifted into .net-land.  Notice that I say "set of
files" not a single cpp or hpp file.  I could hack this by just
creating a header and including all the files in the header but there
may be better options.

How insane is it to imagine lifting the AST into .net?  I could use
swig to perhaps auto-create .net bindings for most of the AST classes,
etc.

How persistent are the AST classes?  The frontends have a callback on
them, HandleTranslationUnit, and I was wondering what in AST land gets
deleted in between calls to HandleTranslationUnit?

Is anyone else working on something like this?

Chris

-- 
A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds - Emerson