[cfe-dev] Using Clang for a C Refactoring Tool

[Mike Stump]

On Apr 10, 2008, at 5:59 PM, Patrick Flannery wrote:
> One area which I have not spent enough time thinking about is what  
> an interface for refactoring should look like.

UIs are hard and hard to test.  If you take the approach of simple  
text in and out, a GUI is free to hook up a pipe to it and a testsuite  
is that much more manageable.  Now, since clang/llvm is a library, the  
notion of hooking up a pipe is silly, but, conceptually you can think  
of the interface that way, and in practice, running the testsuite this  
way I think is worthwhile.

Any GUI code should be independent (lay on top of the library  
interface for refactoring).