[cfe-dev] Storing the NoReturn attribute in Decl nodes.

[Enea Zaffanella]

Hello.

As we are using clang as a base for a source-code based tool, one of our 
goals is to be able to obtain an AST faithfully representing the 
original source code.

Among other things, we would like to have a precise description of the 
set of attributes adorning declarations, as well as the specific syntax 
(gnu, cxx0x, microsoft, ...) used to specify them. One simple option to 
encode this syntax-kind info would be to add a bitfield to the Attr base 
class: this will require no additional memory, since Attr already has a 
bitfield of length 1 (Inherited).

However, we just discovered that, e.g., attribute NoReturn is not stored 
as usual in the list of attributes of the corresponding declaration, but 
  it will rather end up in the FunctionType node, encoded as a single 
bit. This would prevent our tool from distinguishing, e.g., between
    void p [[ noreturn ]] ();
and
    void p() __attribute__ ((__noreturn__));

Similarly, having it in the FunctionType probably means that there will 
be no Inherited bitfield to query, so that we would not be able to know 
if the attribute was written in this very declaration or in a previous 
declaration of the same function.

Would it be acceptable if clang (also) adds this attribute to the list 
of attributes of the corresponding declaration, so that it could be 
queried like all other attributes?

Note the we are NOT suggesting modification to FunctionType nodes, which 
will still encode the noreturn bit for any semantic reasoning; we are 
just asking to add some additional syntactic info where it belongs (the 
attributes of the Decl node).

As an alternative, if you do not want to place it in the Decl node, it 
might be possible to store the NoReturnAttr node in the TypeSourceInfo. 
However, this seems to be an unnecessary complication.

Regards,
Enea Zaffanella.