[cfe-dev] How to add command-line arguments outside of Options.td?

[Mikael Persson]

Hey,

I'm working on the Templight template profiler / debugger. I'm trying to
remove it from the main-line Clang code and make it a tool. So far, it
looks like that will be fairly easy to do, except for one thing.

The problem is that I need to invoke the full-blown Clang compiler, with
all of its options (driver / frontend options), otherwise the profile
readings will not be representative of the real compilation runs. All those
options, it appears, are gathered up in this single global file
"Driver/Options.td" (where the templight options have been placed for the
moment). I don't want to pollute Options.td with the additional options I
need for templight. I've hit a snag where I cannot find a reasonable way to
integrate my additional options.

All the other clang tools seem to be using llvm::cl (LLVM's command-line
utility functions) to create and parse their arguments, and it seems like a
pretty OK solution. But Clang's front-end uses this other hand-written code
(that uses Options.td), starting from CompilerInvocation::CreateFromArgs,
as far as I can tell. I tried to dig into that part a bit, but it's a
complete mystery to me at this point, and of course, no documentation nor
comments to help.

The problem is that both try to catch the "-help" and "-version" options.
Both have redundant options (I think). Both rely on global information that
they assume to be exclusive. Both don't like unknown options... and so on..
they just can't be used together, they seem mutually exclusive.

So, my question is simply, how can I do this?

I'm lost. On one side, migrating all Options.td into llvm::cl would be
insane. And on the other side, the Options.td-based command-line option
parsing from clang's front-end seems like an impenetrable monolith that
does not allow simple added-on options. Please tell me that I'm wrong!
Please!

Thanks, and hope to hear from you guys,

Mikael Persson.
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