[cfe-dev] clang AST printer

[Dmitri Gribenko]

On Fri, Sep 21, 2012 at 4:21 PM, Alexander Kornienko <alexfh at google.com> wrote:
>
> On Fri, Sep 21, 2012 at 2:40 PM, Manuel Klimek <klimek at google.com> wrote:
>>
>> On Fri, Sep 21, 2012 at 12:32 PM, Philip Craig <philipjcraig at gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>> > On Fri, Sep 21, 2012 at 7:49 PM, Manuel Klimek <klimek at google.com>
>> > wrote:
>> >> Hi Philip,
>> >>
>> >> we had a discussion around the strategy for handling ast dumping
>> >> fairly recently. I think the common agreement in the end was that
>> >> instead of having an extra tool, we want to make clang's -ast-dump
>> >> awesome.
>> >
>> > Was this discussion on the mailing list? Any chance you could point me
>> > to it?
>>
>>
>> http://lists.cs.uiuc.edu/pipermail/cfe-commits/Week-of-Mon-20120716/060831.html
>>
>> >> I don't know what your ultimate goal is here, but from my
>> >> side any work that goes towards making clang -ast-dump better would be
>> >> highly appreciated :)
>> >
>> > My motivation was having some way of getting the structure of the AST
>> > for a given piece of source code, so that it is easier to correctly
>> > call the AST matchers to match that code. The issue with clang
>> > -ast-dump is that it pretty prints decls and types. So would the goal
>> > here be to add more command line options to clang to control how
>> > -ast-dump prints the AST?
>>
>> No, I think the goal is to dump decls and types in a sensible way :)
>
>
> More specifically, I think we agreed on changing -ast-dump from
> pretty-printing declarations to outputting them in the same LISP-style
> format, which is used for statements. I was going to implement that, but
> never had time to do this. If you're going to continue work on your utility,
> it would be much more valuable, if you instead improved clang's current
> -ast-dump option. In that case you consider to go this way, here's where to
> start:
>
> clang/lib/Frontend/ASTConsumers.cpp:120: ASTConsumer
> *clang::CreateASTDumper(StringRef FilterString)
>
> is a common entry point, used by "clang -cc1 -ast-dump" and by "clang-check
> -ast-dump". An additional benefit from this would be that after "-ast-dump"
> starts outputting the AST for declarations in a structured form,
> "-ast-dump-xml" will become useless and can be removed.

Does this mean that current declaration printer will be removed?  I
see value in having a decl printer that prints declarations in
user-readable form, so I think we should keep it until clang-format
will be here.

BTW, a while ago I added tests for current decl printer to
unittests/AST/DeclPrinterTest.cpp.

Dmitri

-- 
main(i,j){for(i=2;;i++){for(j=2;j<i;j++){if(!(i%j)){j=0;break;}}if
(j){printf("%d\n",i);}}} /*Dmitri Gribenko <gribozavr at gmail.com>*/