[cfe-dev] tooling helper

[Chandler Carruth]

On Sat, Nov 17, 2012 at 1:34 PM, Dmitri Gribenko <gribozavr at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sat, Nov 17, 2012 at 11:06 PM, Laszlo Nagy
> <rizsotto.mailinglist at gmail.com> wrote:
>> wrote a small program which might help to use the tools, which are using the
>> tooling library. My understanding was that these tools need some compilation
>> database. And one format is the JSON compilation database, which comes for
>> free in a cmake project. Other projects could have difficulties to generate
>> such file. And that's where a tool could help.
>>
>>   https://github.com/rizsotto/Bear
>>
>> It runs the build command and intercept the 'exec' calls, filters the
>> compiler invocations and generate the output file. (It is using LD_PRELOAD
>> from GNU Libc, so it is not really portable.)
>>
>> I know these kind of tools are out of scope here. But wanted to mention,
>> because it could simplify to solve some cases. At least it did to me. ;)
>
> This is very interesting and useful.  Even more, something like this
> could help Clang static analyzer to work with build systems that don't
> respect CC and CXX environment variables.

I don't know what the current state of this is, but waaaay back when
the tooling stuff was going in directly, there was a flag to Clang
itself that would cause Clang to write out the compilation database
just so that it could be used with any build system which could use
the Clang compiler. The hope was that this would serve the needs of
the static analyzer and other tools in interoperating with arbitrary
build systems. Does that not work for some folks?

(We are aware that not everyone is using Clang as their compiler, but
honestly using Clang for tools but not for the compilation isn't going
to work terribly well given that Clang can't transform code it can't
parse....)

-Chandler