[cfe-dev] [PATCH] Implement a sane plugin API for clang

[Joshua Cranmer]

On 3/15/2013 11:01 PM, Sean Silva wrote:
> The clang driver already forks at least one process per compiler 
> invocation. Your comments apply equally to that and I don't see 
> anybody running to fix them (or even complaining), so I'm not 
> convinced that this is really as significant of an issue as you make 
> it out to be.

If I were to add a command in my Makefiles to spawn a $(shell), the 
reviewers would throw a hissy fit. I'll also point out that Clang is not 
a widely-used compilers on Windows systems, where this kind of stuff 
matters more.
>
>     Also, you have to find more binaries to run it: if I specify CXX
>     via a path, how should a build system know where to run
>     clang-plugin-config from? You could guess by looking up the
>     dirname of CXX and hoping it's there,
>
>
> I'm not sure I follow your point here. I image clang-plugin-config and 
> the wrapper to be installed next to clang and be looked up/executed as 
> usual.
>
>     but you are also advocating using shell scripts to represent CXX
>     in another email, which renders this approach impossible.
>
>
> I also don't see the connection with my suggestion in the other email. 
> In fact, the wrapper script for plugins and the compile_commands.json 
> harvester could probably be the same script, and at configure time 
> clang-plugin-config (or, perhaps better just `clang-config` now that 
> it is going beyond plugins) would arrange for the wrapper script to 
> perform the requested actions.

The logic I currently use to look up llvm-config for building the plugin 
is as follows:
if test -z "$CXX"; then
   CXX=`which clang++`
fi
if test -z "$LLVMCONFIG"; then
   LLVMCONFIG=`which llvm-config`
fi
if test -z "$LLVMCONFIG"; then
   LLVMCONFIG=`dirname $CXX`/llvm-config
fi

The ideas is to try to make this "just work" if the compiler to be used 
is clang. However, if CXX is a shell script and clang is not 
specifically in PATH (the latter case is not an esoteric situation--it's 
how our own builders get to clang), then the value returned is wrong. 
It's also wrong if people start using clang with versioning numbers: 
consider clang symlinked to a clang-3.2, but you're building with 
clang-3.3. Looking up llvm-config in the path would find the llvm-config 
for 3.2 here instead of 3.3, which would be wrong. IMHO, gcc's 
-print-file-name=plugin is much better (you don't need to guess at the 
locations of other tools!).

>>     If you really want to immediately push plugins forward in a big
>>     way, it would be monumental to set up a buildbot that runs a
>>     clang plugin that does extra checking that isn't really
>>     appropriate for being integrated as a diagnostic into the
>>     compiler proper. For example, a plugin that warns on incorrect
>>     uses of dyn_cast<>. For maximum effect this should be developed
>>     in-tree (probably in clang-tools-extra. Even though it has
>>     "tools" in the name, I don't think anybody would be opposed to
>>     developing plugins in there). It should also have an easy way for
>>     people in our community to come up with and implement good extra
>>     checks and get them integrated into that buildbot.
>
>     I am working on adding a compiler static checker plugin to Mozilla
>     that would check the guarantees our old dehydra plugin used to
>     check: a "must override" annotation (all subclasses must provide
>     their own implementation of this method), a "stack class"
>     annotation (this class cannot be allocated from the heap), and a
>     warning that gets emitted every time you emit a static initializer.
>
>
> Awesome. Please keep us up to date with this work. Some of these 
> checks seem like they could be relevant to llvm/clang too.

The biggest stumbling block to implementing useful checkers is the 
inability to add custom annotations... annotate(string) is currently 
being used as a hack, but what is really needed is the ability to 
specify custom C++11 attributes. Actually committing the static checker 
can be found in <https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=767563>, 
but there is a long list of desired analyses here 
<https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/buglist.cgi?list_id=6034150&resolution=---&query_format=advanced&component=Rewriting%20and%20Analysis&product=Core>.
>
>>         The changes in this patch retain almost all of the same
>>         functionality as the original plugin approach (including the
>>         ability to do things like add custom compile passes via the
>>         RegisterPass statics) while wrapping it in a much saner wrapper.
>>
>>
>>     My opposition to the current patch is that it does not provide
>>     enough value to our users to compensate for the inconvenience
>>     that it will cause them (by breaking their code). My opposition
>>     is not technical; I don't doubt that your approach here is an
>>     improvement from a purely technical standpoint.
>
>     The current plugin approach presumes that it is a pure consumer of
>     the AST, which isn't a viable option in my opinion. One thing I
>     would like to do in the future is be able to map Decls in the AST
>     to functions emitted in the LLVM IR, which is completely
>     impossible under the current architecture. Note also that I'm not
>     removing the current (more or less broken) plugin architecture, so
>     I'm not compelling people to switch.
>
>
> You did delete the only code (PrintFunctionNames) in tree that AFAIK 
> tests the previous functionality, which I interpreted as meaning that 
> it was dead to you.

The old API I consider deprecated, but deprecated does not mean imminent 
removal. Also, the examples directory isn't built by default, so I doubt 
it's actually really being tested.
>
>     Rather, this is about enabling future changes that permit plugins
>     to not take the view that they happen independently of code
>     generation.
>
> This did not get through to me from the OP. Could you explain how the 
> design you implement in this patch achieves that? It should be the 
> emphasis of the review (and IMHO warrants a "does this direction and 
> implementation approach sound good to everyone" cfe-dev discussion 
> before proposing code to be committed).

If you pay careful attention, you'd notice that the plugins are kept 
around in the CompilerInstance object, which is passed around to all the 
AST actions, including the CodeGen AST action; the old plugin API stores 
everything as separate AST actions and instead multiplexes all the AST 
actions together, so the CodeGen AST action is unaware of the existence 
of plugins, short of creating Yet Another Static Initializer attachment 
point.

> Also, the command line parsing stuff should be in a separate patch, 
> and IMO the -fplugin should be just a driver arg: that way, the 
> previous commandline args for plugins (directly via cc1) remains in a 
> live code path.

That isn't feasible here, as the two plugin loading paths are actually 
doing rather different things, and I don't think it is desirable to 
attempt to merge what are conceptually different models of plugins.

> As I said earlier, the compatibilty stuff also deserves a rehash, 
> since I'm still not convinced that it is really useful.
The primary purpose of compatibility checking is to detect a situation 
that would almost certainly lead to crash instead of crashing. Users 
deserve to get useful error messages instead of panicking crash dumps.

-- 
Joshua Cranmer
News submodule owner
DXR coauthor

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