[cfe-dev] converting a LibTooling tool to a library

[Manuel Klimek]

On Fri, Oct 26, 2012 at 8:32 PM, Eric Schulte <schulte.eric at gmail.com>wrote:

> Manuel Klimek <klimek at google.com> writes:
>
> > On Fri, Oct 26, 2012 at 5:48 PM, Eric Schulte <schulte.eric at gmail.com
> >wrote:
> >
> >> Hi,
> >>
> >> I've written a simple command-line code-mutation tool using the Tooling
> >> infrastructure [1].  The tooling framework handled many of the difficult
> >> portions of this task (handling compilation databases etc...) allowing
> >> me to focus on writing a RecursiveASTVisitor -- my thanks to everyone
> >> who worked on the tooling setup and on clang in general.
> >>
> >
> > :)
> >
> > I would now like to expose the functionality of this ASTVisitor as a C
> >> library so that I can call these functions programatically and chain
> >> multiple ASTConsumers without the overhead of multiple shell calls,
> >> repeatedly parsing of the original source, etc...
> >>
> >> Is this possible?  Is this difficult?  Is there a best practice for
> >> transitioning from a command-line Tooling tool to a library?  Should I
> >> just look though the clang/Tooling source?  Any pointers or suggestions
> >> would be greatly appreciated.
> >>
> >
> > I think you're the first one to go this route - one thing I notice is
> that
> > you say "C library". I assume that's a requirement? In general, the way
> I'd
> > go about this is:
> > - build a C++ library
> > - build a C wrapper that exposes the functionality
> >
>
> Great, I'll take this approach.  Hopefully it won't be overly difficult
> to pull the relevant preparatory code (source -> AST conversion) out of
> the existing Tooling libraries.
>
> >
> > That's pretty much the way libclang does it (minus some stuff that's only
> > in libclang, but we've already noticed some of that stuff would be very
> > nice to have in a C++ layer).
> >
> > Your tool is also sufficiently narrow focus currently that I think it
> might
> > make sense to go into clang mainline as a library and be useful from
> > libclang, but Doug might have a different opinion.
> >
>
> I initially hoped to use libclang for this work but found it did not
> include any Code Rewriting functionality.  I don't know if my ASTMutate
> library is the best abstraction around code rewriting, but I would love
> to see some rewriting support in libclang.
>
> >
> >
> >> Thanks,
> >>
> >> Footnotes:
> >> [1]  https://github.com/eschulte/clang-mutate
> >
> >
> > Nice! Looks awesome :)
> > /me wonders whether it would be a perfect fit for the extra-tools
> > repository...
> >
>
> This does seem like it could be a nice fit.  If the extra-tools repo
> would like to include this mutation tool then I'm happy to help with the
> integration, just let me know what I can do.
>

http://clang.llvm.org/docs/ClangTools.html

Cheers,
/Manuel


>
> Thanks,
>
> >
> > Cheers,
> > /Manuel
>
> --
> Eric Schulte
> http://cs.unm.edu/~eschulte
>
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