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

[Kim Gräsman]

Hi Guy,

I can't make any solid recommendations, I live at the outskirts of
Clang development, and I'm often wrong :-) But it seems like it would
give you the highest-fidelity model of the C++ AST.

If I understand things correctly, a plugin runs *with compilation*. If
you want to run your translation without actually compiling/generating
code, a tool might be a better fit:
http://clang.llvm.org/docs/Tooling.html

Hope that helps,
- Kim

On Sun, Jun 29, 2014 at 11:59 PM, Guy Sherman <guy at guysherman.com> wrote:
> 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.
>>>>
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>>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
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>