[cfe-dev] AST Matchers tutorial

[Sean Silva]

Thank you for writing this up! :-)

A couple things:

Since you're assuming zero Clang experience, I think you can leave out
the git-svn stuff (since AFAIK that is only relevant for people with
commit access). A simpler way to just checkout LLVM/Clang is

$ git clone http://llvm.org/git/llvm.git
$ cd source/tools
$ git clone http://llvm.org/git/clang.git

The git-svn checkout stuff that you are doing looks kind of fearsome.
It's easier for a newcomer to just use a pure git workflow.

Also, you may want to touch on the scenario that a person already has
CMake installed. E.g., that it should be a certain version, needs to
be compiled with certain flags, etc.

> Ninja dependency resolver.

I would call this "Ninja build tool".


You should probably link to the LLVM commandline library docs
<http://llvm.org/docs/CommandLine.html> in the relevant part of the
document.

> the loop’s index variable is compared against N - 1

generally aren't half-open loops comparing against N, and not N-1? e.g.
for (int I = 0, N = 10; I != N; ++I)


I think that just a little bit more explanation about the use of
FoldingSetNodeID in areSameExpr() would be good. (just explain roughly
what it does, links to docs, etc)

As far as your patch. My gut seems inclined to have this inside the
examples/ subdirectory, since the code is really just example code to
accompany the tutorial.

That's all for now. Thank you so much for the extensive docs!

--Sean.

On Tue, Jul 31, 2012 at 6:34 PM, Sam Panzer <panzer at google.com> wrote:
> Hello, again!
>
> As suggested by a few people, I have been writing up my experiences starting
> development on Clang, and specifically working with Clang-based refactoring
> tools. The repository where my loop converter will live doesn't exist yet,
> so I will use the tutorial as a chance to start offering patches for review
> (they can be rebased to other locations later).
>
> My intention was to begin assuming zero Clang experience and work towards
> building a slightly simplified version of the loop converter through a
> series of fully-explained patches to Clang to a unit-tested functional tool.
> Because the Getting Started page is aimed at people who want to use Clang
> rather than develop for it, I began with cloning clang+llvm from the git
> mirrors and preparing a cmake+ninja build.
>
> What I have so far is currently available as a Google Doc here:
> https://docs.google.com/document/d/1oTkVLhCdRJUEH1_LDaQdXqe8-aOqT5GLDL9e4MhoFF8/edit
> If enough people think that the tutorial is useful, I can eventually convert
> it to a nicer format (i.e. HTML with prettier code formatting). I expect to
> have made mistakes, especially in the section about obtaining and building
> Clang :)
>
> Thoughts?
> -Sam
>
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