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

[Mathieu Baudet]

Hi Guy,

I don't know if this is going to be directly helpful for you, but you
might be interested in having a look at the clang plugin we have been
coding to export the Clang AST in Json and load it into Ocaml (using a
generated parser based on the inlined schema).
  https://github.com/facebook/facebook-clang-plugins/blob/master/libtooling/ASTExporter.cpp
  https://github.com/facebook/facebook-clang-plugins/blob/master/libtooling/ATD_GUIDELINES.md

Disclaimer: this is still work in progress for the c++ part.

Cheers,
-- Mathieu

2014-06-29 23:32 GMT-07:00 Kim Gräsman <kim.grasman at gmail.com>:
> 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.
>>>>>
>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>> cfe-dev mailing list
>>>>> cfe-dev at cs.uiuc.edu
>>>>> http://lists.cs.uiuc.edu/mailman/listinfo/cfe-dev
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
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>>
>
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