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

[Guy Sherman]

Hi Kim,

I’ve done a bit more reading, and I think that my approach will be to build a Clang plugin that contains 
a RecursoveASTVisitor implementaiton. Does this sound like the right approach to you?


Thanks,

Guy.

On 30/06/2014, at 12:30 am, Kim Gräsman <kim.grasman at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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.
>>> 
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> cfe-dev mailing list
>>> cfe-dev at cs.uiuc.edu
>>> http://lists.cs.uiuc.edu/mailman/listinfo/cfe-dev
>>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
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