[cfe-dev] clang AST printer

[Dmitri Gribenko]

On Fri, Sep 21, 2012 at 6:37 PM, Manuel Klimek <klimek at google.com> wrote:
> On Fri, Sep 21, 2012 at 5:32 PM, Dmitri Gribenko <gribozavr at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Fri, Sep 21, 2012 at 4:21 PM, Alexander Kornienko <alexfh at google.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> On Fri, Sep 21, 2012 at 2:40 PM, Manuel Klimek <klimek at google.com> wrote:
>>>>
>>>> On Fri, Sep 21, 2012 at 12:32 PM, Philip Craig <philipjcraig at gmail.com>
>>>> wrote:
>>>> > On Fri, Sep 21, 2012 at 7:49 PM, Manuel Klimek <klimek at google.com>
>>>> > wrote:
>>>> >> 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.
>>>> >
>>>> > Was this discussion on the mailing list? Any chance you could point me
>>>> > to it?
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> http://lists.cs.uiuc.edu/pipermail/cfe-commits/Week-of-Mon-20120716/060831.html
>>>>
>>>> >> 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 :)
>>>> >
>>>> > My motivation was having some way of getting the structure of the AST
>>>> > for a given piece of source code, so that it is easier to correctly
>>>> > call the AST matchers to match that code. The issue with clang
>>>> > -ast-dump is that it pretty prints decls and types. So would the goal
>>>> > here be to add more command line options to clang to control how
>>>> > -ast-dump prints the AST?
>>>>
>>>> No, I think the goal is to dump decls and types in a sensible way :)
>>>
>>>
>>> More specifically, I think we agreed on changing -ast-dump from
>>> pretty-printing declarations to outputting them in the same LISP-style
>>> format, which is used for statements. I was going to implement that, but
>>> never had time to do this. If you're going to continue work on your utility,
>>> it would be much more valuable, if you instead improved clang's current
>>> -ast-dump option. In that case you consider to go this way, here's where to
>>> start:
>>>
>>> clang/lib/Frontend/ASTConsumers.cpp:120: ASTConsumer
>>> *clang::CreateASTDumper(StringRef FilterString)
>>>
>>> is a common entry point, used by "clang -cc1 -ast-dump" and by "clang-check
>>> -ast-dump". An additional benefit from this would be that after "-ast-dump"
>>> starts outputting the AST for declarations in a structured form,
>>> "-ast-dump-xml" will become useless and can be removed.
>>
>> Does this mean that current declaration printer will be removed?  I
>> see value in having a decl printer that prints declarations in
>> user-readable form, so I think we should keep it until clang-format
>> will be here.
>
> I'd be curious what your use case is - after all, it'll only print
> declrations in user-readable form, and all the other stuff will be
> written in S-epxression-like syntax.

The decl printer could be used to pretty-print decls in some
clang-based documentation generation system.

> If we want a pretty-printer, I'd expect -pretty-print and not
> -ast-dump to trigger that?

I'd just leave it as an API.

Dmitri

-- 
main(i,j){for(i=2;;i++){for(j=2;j<i;j++){if(!(i%j)){j=0;break;}}if
(j){printf("%d\n",i);}}} /*Dmitri Gribenko <gribozavr at gmail.com>*/