[cfe-dev] Modifying struct layout

[Cristiano Giuffrida]

Right. I'm actually considering all the options, since I would like to
use this strategy in different scenarios.
Say we rule out the possibility of a source-to-source translation and
we want to directly modify the ASTs on-the-fly to get the job done.
Would that be possible?

On Tue, Jan 17, 2012 at 11:49 PM, John McCall <rjmccall at apple.com> wrote:
> On Jan 17, 2012, at 2:31 PM, Cristiano Giuffrida wrote:
>> I'm interested in programmatically modifying the layout of arbitrary
>> (non-packed) structs in C programs using a source-to-source
>> transformation. In particular, I would like to: (1) reorder the
>> members of a struct basing on a predetermined criteria; (2) add
>> predefined padding (or dummy members of a predefined size) at the
>> beginning of the struct and between consecutive struct members.
>>
>> LLVM types are immutable and I don't think the transformation can be
>> implemented as an LLVM pass. I'm considering using clang (ideally a
>> clang plugin) for the job, but I'm not sure this is possible/easy to
>> do.
>> Is there any way to achieve (1) and/or (2) with clang? For example,
>> changing an existing type declaration
>> (clang::TypeDecl::setTypeForDecl()) with a newly-created type or
>> modifying ASTRecordLayout directly?
>
> If you want to do source-to-source translation, I don't understand why
> you care about modifying the ASTs at all.  Just find the struct
> declarations you care about, create a similar struct with the layout
> you want, print that out, and have Clang's rewriter replace the original
> source range with the new text.
>
> John.