[cfe-dev] A Question regarding the use of clang API for IDE

[David Röthlisberger]

On 13 Dec 2012, at 07:49, Yossi Kantor wrote:
> 
> Hi,
> 
> I'm developing an IDE which uses clang API (clang-c/Index.h). Eventually I intend to implement
> Syntax highlighting, indentation, diagnostics and code completion. So clang is just perfect.
> 
> My 2 questions are :
> 
> Its seems that in the API, the only option is  clang_parseTranslationUnit/clang_reparseTranslationUnit.
> The thing is, that those functions receive as a parameter either a file name on a disk or a file name
> in memory in a form of const char* pointer and length. The open file in my IDE is not stored in that
> straightforward way in the memory (or I guess any other text editor) so is there a way to feed the parser from a byte stream of any sort?
> 
> The second question is: Currently I try to implement syntax highlighting, which means that 
> for every press of a key (pretty much) in the editor I need to re parse and tokenize the entire file, so that I'll get the updated information on how and what to highlight. While clang performs those action 
> quite fast, and for diagnostics and code completion this totally acceptable, I do feel that its a bit of an overkill for syntax lighting where simple (and maybe partial or incremental) tokinizing of an input
> buffer would be sufficient.
> Is there something I'm missing? Are t there are other clang methods that I can use ?
> 
> Thank you very much,
> Yossi.

Are you aware of
http://lists.cs.uiuc.edu/pipermail/cfe-dev/2012-June/022028.html ?

(As far as I know it is still at the design/discussion stage.)

Dave.