[cfe-dev] Using the Clang AST to generate other abstract models

[Kim Gräsman]

Guy, Nikola,

Wouldn't it be better to implement this as a separate
RecursiveASTVisitor-based tool? That way you don't have to interpret
intermediate formats, but rather stay close to the source.

Also, a RecursiveASTVisitor implementation can be made complete;
--ast-dump seems to be selective in what it emits.

- Kim

On Sun, Jun 29, 2014 at 12:02 PM, Guy Sherman <guy at guysherman.com> wrote:
> Hi Nikola,
>
> I would be more than happy to contribute my work back… MSE is not an
> XML-based format though. Although I guess say I could use XML as an
> intermediate format. Would the AST-dump code be the best starting point
> either way?
>
> Thanks,
>
> Guy.
>
> On 29/06/2014, at 9:51 pm, Nikola Smiljanic <popizdeh at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Hi Guy, clang used to have xml printer long time ago but it was removed as
> it lacked in many ways. This came up a few times and I think the community
> is not opposed to having this functionality, if done right. This is in case
> you're interested in contributing your changes back to clang. If not you can
> just hack away on your working copy.
>
> Others might have better ideas, but you can search the mailing list for xml
> schema related discussion
>
> Nikola.
>
>
> On Sun, Jun 29, 2014 at 7:17 PM, Guy Sherman <guy at guysherman.com> wrote:
>>
>> Hi There,
>>
>> I’m new to this list and new to mucking around with compilers, so I crave
>> your indulgence.
>>
>> There is a suite of tools called Moose Tools
>> (http://www.moosetechnology.org/), which is somewhat like a Business
>> Intelligence platform for codebases. You convert a codebase to a model of
>> that codebase, and then you can build queries on top of that mode, and
>> visualisations on top of those queries. The models are called an “MSE” file,
>> and they seem similar to an AST.
>>
>> So anyway, there are reasonably good tools to import codebases from java,
>> smalltalk, etc, but nothing that I’ve tried for C/C++ seems to do the job.
>> So, I did a little bit of reading about Clang and LLVM, and have been
>> wanting to try using the Clang front-end but instead of spitting out LLVM IR
>> I want to generate an MSE file. I had a look at the output from the AST-dump
>> mode of Clang and it looks like the data would be suitable, I could probably
>> write a python script to parse that output and convert it, but I would
>> rather do it properly.
>>
>> I’m not sure of the right approach though… I could start hacking on the
>> AST-dump mode, but I imagine that this is not something that you would ever
>> want to keep in the CFE codebase. So, is there some guidance somewhere, on
>> putting together the minimal subset of the CFE that I would need in order to
>> be able to dump the AST? Or should I just fork CFE and start from there?
>>
>>
>> Many thanks,
>>
>>
>> Guy Sherman.
>>
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>
>
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