[cfe-dev] RFC: Clang Automatic Bug Reporting

[Tom Prince]

On Mon, Jul 19, 2010 at 08:44:45AM -0700, Daniel Dunbar wrote:
> 
> Virtual File System
> ===================
> 
> My plan is to add a new LLVM interface which abstracts high-level access to the
> file system. This interface will live at the llvm/Support level, and is designed
> to have a thin API -- it won't be a full VFS layer, but rather it will support
> the higher level LLVM file operations, i.e. getting a MemoryBuffer or
> raw_ostream. We will also need additional interfaces to support things like
> stat() or quickly testing file existence. The Support library will provide a
> default implementation of the VFS interface which uses the normal file system. I
> don't have a sketch of the API yet, but I'm confident we can achieve something
> clean.
> 
> Once the llvm/Support level VFS interface is in place, the Clang
> CompilerInstance object will get a VFS object. I will then refactor all the
> Clang IO access to go through this object. The main piece here is changing the
> FileManager to live on top of the VFS object, but all the other places the
> driver & frontend access files will need to move as well.
> 
> There is also some possibility that once this work is done we can simplify some
> existing interfaces, for example the current file remapping APIs or PTH's stat
> cache.

This interface sounds like it might also be useful for a distcc like
implementation.