[cfe-dev] parsing without building an AST tree

[Anders Bakken]

Hi

We're writing a clang-based tagger and while trying to improve the
performance of our solution we came upon this paragraph:

"Elsa is not built as a stack of reusable libraries like clang is. It
is very difficult to use part of Elsa without the whole front-end. For
example, you cannot use Elsa to parse C/ObjC code without building an
AST. You can do this in Clang and it is much faster than building an
AST."

from here: http://clang.llvm.org/comparison.html

We've been using the C-api in clang-c/Index.h but if we could get
better performance by using the C++ APIs directly we'd gladly do so
(even if it might change or be harder to use).

Is there an example or some documentation on how to do this somewhere possibly?

regards

Anders