[cfe-dev] clang AST printer

[Manuel Klimek]

Hi Philip,

we had a discussion around the strategy for handling ast dumping
fairly recently. I think the common agreement in the end was that
instead of having an extra tool, we want to make clang's -ast-dump
awesome. I don't know what your ultimate goal is here, but from my
side any work that goes towards making clang -ast-dump better would be
highly appreciated :)

Cheers,
/Manuel

On Fri, Sep 21, 2012 at 1:17 AM, Philip Craig <philipjcraig at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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
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