[cfe-dev] A documentation tool based on clang AST.

[David Röthlisberger]

On 13 Sep 2013, at 07:17, Sean Silva wrote:
> 
> On Thu, Sep 12, 2013 at 1:27 AM, Dmitri Gribenko <gribozavr at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Wed, Sep 11, 2013 at 3:51 AM, Juan Jose Lopez Villarejo <jj.lopezvillarejo at cern.ch> wrote:
>> > Hello, and thanks for the reply, Dimitri.
>> >
>> > You give me half of a solution: as you point out, we would need to attach comments to statements.
>> >
>> > Is there any developper that would be willing to do such an extension as you propose:
>> > ASTContext::getRawCommentForStmtNoCache()
>> > getCommentForStmt()
>> >
>> > Alternatively, how feasible you see that we could implement such an extension (novel to clang, physicist) and that it be maintained?!
>> 
>> Quite a few other developers have asked the same question (if Clang
>> can attach comments to statements) during past year, but eventually
>> did not send patches.  Nevertheless, this shows that community is
>> interested in such functionality.
>> 
>> I would not call this hard to implement, but this is not a trivial
>> change either: you will need to learn at least about Clang's AST,
>> source location model (and how it interacts with the macros), lexer
>> and parser architecture.  In addition to implementing the feature, you
>> will also need to design a way to test these APIs *in clang tree*
>> (without your tool) and write the tests.
> 
> I don't think that adding maintenance burden to clang for each new documentation format is sustainable anyway. Best to take advantage of modular/library-based design and keep these kinds of tools out of tree.

Hi Sean

Could you please clarify what you mean? I don't think anyone is
proposing to put Juan Jose's tool in-tree. The proposal is to add a
mechanism for retrieving comments immediately preceding a statement --
would that be something you'd accept in-tree?

Thanks,
Dave.