[cfe-dev] [GSoC] Doxygen documentation with clang

[Jonathan 'Rynn' Sauer]

Hello,

> one of the project ideas for GSoC 2014 is a clang-based tool to
> generate documentation using doxygen-style comments in the source
> code.  I wanted to gauge the interest into such a project, see if
> someone is willing to mentor it, and provide a rough outline of what
> my idea of the project is. Any feedback on this is very welcome.

This project sounds very interesting and definitely useful; "clang-doc" in addition
to clang-format and the static analyzer.

A few points:

1. Doxygen offers the possibility to define custom commands in its config file[1]. I am
   using this in my code to document the bindings to the scripting language Lua, i.e.
   @luaparam to document a parameter and @luareturn to document a return value. AFAIK
   clang currently does not support custom commands and warns about their use (unless
   -Wno-documentation-unknown-command is specified).

   Do you plan on extending clang so custom doxygen commands can be defined?

2. As far as the external projects you mention go: Maybe they could be implemented with
   precompiled header files, similar to the way clang's modules (in C and Objective-C) are
   handled[2]: By saving and loading clang's AST.


Jonathan

[1] <http://www.stack.nl/~dimitri/doxygen/manual/custcmd.html>
[2] <http://clang.llvm.org/docs/Modules.html>