[cfe-dev] RFC: Adding a rename refactoring tool to clang

[Nikola Smiljanic]

Hi Daniel, it would be interesting to hear if clang is able to
parse/compile your codebase and where it fails if not.


On Thu, Jul 31, 2014 at 4:00 PM, Daniel Albuschat <d.albuschat at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Hi,
>
> 2014-07-30 19:13 GMT+02:00 "C. Bergström" <cbergstrom at pathscale.com>:
>
>> On 07/30/14 11:42 PM, Richard wrote:
>>
>>> This is where clang-based refactoring tools are really going to shine.
>>> Leveraging the *production quality* parser and resulting lossless AST
>>> just puts you miles ahead in the game.
>>>
>> Have you evaluated MSVC+Visually Assist plugin? While it's not IntelliJ,
>> I have heard good things about it. I think that's a professional level
>> baseline which other tools could work towards matching/beating..
>>
>> This is OT for the list, but you and others are welcome to follow-up with
>> me offlist for the refactoring stuff we are doing where I work.
>>
>> The refactoring work I have experience with ends up relying on things
>> which go sorta outside the typical libclang tooling realm. You really have
>> a lot to track beyond just a single source file and dealing with that can
>> get tricky.
>>
>
> I have much experience with refactoring large C++ codebases, all depending
> on WinAPI. My conclusion is: Visual Assist X seems to currently be the best
> tool at the market. However, it is quite useless, since most - if not any -
> refactoring-attempts at an over 20-year-old codebase with roughly 2 million
> lines of Microsoft-infested C++ code (DWORD, BOOL, etc.) failed. Even
> small, local refactorings take a) very long and b) mostly yield incorrect
> results.
> For example, there was a paradigm to have a nested "data"-class inside of
> classes that manage the ui. They all share the same name, albeit being
> nested inside of totally different classes. VA X failed miserably analysing
> ("Go to definition") and refactoring this.
>
> BTW, this is similar to Microsoft's effort regarding Roslyn: They already
> understood that there can be no sufficiently functioning refactoring tool
> that does not actually use the compiler's parser itself.
>
> If clang-rename will be able to handle the codebase I am working with, I
> will be in sheer joy.
>
> Greetings,
> Daniel Albuschat
>
>
>
>
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