[cfe-dev] Evolution of advanced refactoring support

[Manuel Klimek]

On Tue, Feb 26, 2013 at 10:02 PM, Markus Elfring <Markus.Elfring at web.de>wrote:

>
>  We did not find that coccinelle matched what we needed, but a lot of it
>> might be related to "effort of implementation".
>>
>
> I find that the Coccinelle technology is a promising approach. It works
> for patches on C programming language files.
>

It's most definitely interesting.

I think the main downside of a pattern based matching language is that C++
is this huge beast of a language, where lots of implicit stuff happens.
It's comparatively easy to express matches on C code as "patterns", but
it's really hard to do the same for C++.


> I assume that you imagine a different data structure for the specification
> of consistent source code transformations across translation units.

 It's definitely not something we're going to do :)
>>
>>
> It is a pity. - I hope that some results from knowledge areas like
> Smalltalk, Java or OCaml can be better reused in the near future.
> Would you like to avoid to reinvent a "coding wheel"?
>

There's nothing I'm trying to avoid. I find many of those approaches
interesting, but I don't see that it would give us the kind of pay-off for
the effort I estimate and thus we put priority on other things...

Cheers,
/Manuel
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