<html><head><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html charset=windows-1252"></head><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space;"><br><div><div>On Jul 5, 2013, at 3:28 PM, Daniel Albuschat <<a href="mailto:d.albuschat@gmail.com">d.albuschat@gmail.com</a>> wrote:</div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"><blockquote type="cite"><div style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px;"><div dir="ltr">Hi there,<div><br></div><div>I recently started looking into the Clang project and have to admit that I would never have expected it to be that mature. And I really appreciate the design decisions that lead to Clang being that re-usable and flexible. I think you're doing each and every C++ programmer a great favor and Clang will spawn an immense number of awesome tools in the future that we previously might not have imagined being possible to implement.</div><div><br></div><div>Enough praising, here is my actual question:</div><div>Is there any tool that reads an AST, saves it to some file or database, and later is able to *restore* that AST completely (e.g. to be able to create LLVM IR from it)? I'm trying to do something similar, so it'd be nice to know whether someone did that before.</div><div>The precompiled header implementations should do something like this, shouldn't they? Is their AST representation complete, or are they missing things like control-flow?<br></div></div></div></blockquote><br></div><div>Yes to everything. The precompiled header implementation serializes the entire AST. You can use clang -cc1’s ‘-emit-ast’ option to emit the serialized AST into a “.ast” file, which can then be used to generate LLVM IR. It hasn’t been extensively tested, and to my knowledge nobody is doing this in a production environment, but the test file test/Frontend/ast-codegen.c illustrates how to do it and that it isn’t *completely* broken.</div><div><br></div><div><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>- Doug</div><br></body></html>