[cfe-dev] clang AST printer

[Philip Craig]

Hi,

I've been writing a tool to print a clang AST. You can find it at
https://github.com/philipc/clang-ast. I've been mostly writing this as
a learning exercise, but I would like to see if there is any wider
interest in the tool.

I'm new to clang, and interested in working on tooling. For this task,
it is important to have an understanding of the AST. I've found the
documentation at http://clang.llvm.org/docs/InternalsManual.html and
http://clang.llvm.org/docs/IntroductionToTheClangAST.html (is there
any more?), but I think it would be helpful to be able to print the
AST for source code to see how it is used in practice. I've found two
ways to do this currently, which aren't quite what I wanted:

clang --ast-dump
- pretty prints some parts, has too much internal info, more suited
for debugging use by clang developers

clang --ast-dump-xml
- incomplete and XML is too verbose for this purpose

Since RecursiveASTVisitor seems to be the API that will be used by
tool developers, I've been using RAV to print the AST. I've found a
few minor bugs in RAV as a result of this, which I'm in the process of
submitting.

One limitation of RAV is that the Visit methods aren't given
information about their relationship with their parent, so the tool
can only list all the children of a node, without distinguishing
between the LHS and RHS of an operator, for example. Is there any
desire to extend RAV to be able to do this?

I've been writing small code snippets to test printing the various
parts of the AST. If you want to see examples of the output of the
tool, this is included in the test cases. As a quick example, "void
foo() {}" is printed as:

  FunctionDecl
    DeclarationName foo
    FunctionNoProtoType
      BuiltinType void
    CompoundStmt

Finally, I've been trying to give a textual description of the AST
grammar in https://github.com/philipc/clang-ast/blob/master/ast.txt.
This is an attempt to give something similar to
http://docs.python.org/py3k/library/ast.html#abstract-grammar. I'm not
sure if it is turning out to be that useful though.

Any comments welcome!

Thanks,
Philip