[cfe-dev] clang AST printer

[Sean Silva]

> 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. 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 :)

Here's an idea:

$ clang -ast-dump="<arbitrary ASTMatcher expression>"

--Sean Silva

On Fri, Sep 21, 2012 at 5:49 AM, 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. 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 :)
>
> Cheers,
> /Manuel
>
> On Fri, Sep 21, 2012 at 1:17 AM, Philip Craig <philipjcraig at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> I've been writing a tool to print a clang AST. You can find it at
>> https://github.com/philipc/clang-ast. I've been mostly writing this as
>> a learning exercise, but I would like to see if there is any wider
>> interest in the tool.
>>
>> I'm new to clang, and interested in working on tooling. For this task,
>> it is important to have an understanding of the AST. I've found the
>> documentation at http://clang.llvm.org/docs/InternalsManual.html and
>> http://clang.llvm.org/docs/IntroductionToTheClangAST.html (is there
>> any more?), but I think it would be helpful to be able to print the
>> AST for source code to see how it is used in practice. I've found two
>> ways to do this currently, which aren't quite what I wanted:
>>
>> clang --ast-dump
>> - pretty prints some parts, has too much internal info, more suited
>> for debugging use by clang developers
>>
>> clang --ast-dump-xml
>> - incomplete and XML is too verbose for this purpose
>>
>> Since RecursiveASTVisitor seems to be the API that will be used by
>> tool developers, I've been using RAV to print the AST. I've found a
>> few minor bugs in RAV as a result of this, which I'm in the process of
>> submitting.
>>
>> One limitation of RAV is that the Visit methods aren't given
>> information about their relationship with their parent, so the tool
>> can only list all the children of a node, without distinguishing
>> between the LHS and RHS of an operator, for example. Is there any
>> desire to extend RAV to be able to do this?
>>
>> I've been writing small code snippets to test printing the various
>> parts of the AST. If you want to see examples of the output of the
>> tool, this is included in the test cases. As a quick example, "void
>> foo() {}" is printed as:
>>
>>   FunctionDecl
>>     DeclarationName foo
>>     FunctionNoProtoType
>>       BuiltinType void
>>     CompoundStmt
>>
>> Finally, I've been trying to give a textual description of the AST
>> grammar in https://github.com/philipc/clang-ast/blob/master/ast.txt.
>> This is an attempt to give something similar to
>> http://docs.python.org/py3k/library/ast.html#abstract-grammar. I'm not
>> sure if it is turning out to be that useful though.
>>
>> Any comments welcome!
>>
>> Thanks,
>> Philip
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