[cfe-dev] DXR alpha release

[Joshua Cranmer]

I am pleased to announce an alpha release of DXR built on top of Clang. 
A live demo of DXR can be found at <http://dxr.mozilla.org/clang/>, 
which is an index of a relatively recent copy of the Clang source code. 
Since this is merely an alpha release, expect to find bugs and 
inconsistencies in the output. For more information, you can go to 
#static on irc.mozilla.org or contact Mozilla's static analysis list 
(<news://news.mozilla.org/mozilla.dev.static-analysis> or 
https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-static-analysis>).

So what is DXR? DXR is a smart code browser that works by using 
instrumented compilers to use what the compiler knows about the code to 
provide a database of the code. For C and C++ in particular, using an 
instrumented compiler is necessary, since it is the only reliable way to 
fix the issue of macros. Take, for instance, RecursiveASTVisitor in the 
Clang codebase. Most of the almost 1200 functions are defined via macros 
as opposed to in raw code; as a consequence, the doxygen output for this 
class is useless: as far as I can tell, there are only five methods I 
can override to visit AST nodes. On the other hand, DXR neatly tells me 
all of the methods that are defined, and can point me to the place where 
that function is defined (within the macro, of course).

Where can you get the code? DXR is available at both 
<https://github.com/mozilla/dxr> (use the dxr-clang branch) and 
<http://hg.mozilla.org/webtools/dxr>. Instructions on how to use DXR can 
be found on its wiki page, <http://wiki.mozilla.org/DXR>.


-- 
Joshua Cranmer
News submodule owner
DXR coauthor