[cfe-dev] Two GSoC ideas

[Mat Sutcliffe]

Just a neighbourly bump to let you know that I have submitted these two
proposals, so if they look like something you'd like to mentor me on,
please make yourself known.

Clang refactoring tools
http://goo.gl/4zxqYv

A clang-based alternative to SWIG
http://goo.gl/Vb3WDO

Cheers,
Mat


On 7 March 2015 at 21:32, Mat Sutcliffe <oktal3700 at gmail.com> wrote:

> Greetings,
>
> I have two ideas revolving around Clang that I'd like to propose for the
> Google Summer of Code. Because I'm equally interested in both ideas, I'm
> posting brief descriptions of them here, in the hope that if one of them is
> received better than the other then I could save time by only proposing
> one. But if neither one is clearly preferred then I will formally propose
> both.
>
> I am fascinated by the videos I've watched of conference presentations
> about LibTooling. It can make large scale refactorings very easy. But at
> the small and medium scales, it seems like it would still be cheaper in
> many cases to do the refactoring by hand, because an automated tool to
> perform one specific refactoring would be unlikely to retain its usefulness
> after the refactoring is done. To reduce the cost of small scale LibTooling
> refactorings, I imagine a kind of rapid development tool for LibTooling
> refactorings, which would help a user to compose a LibTooling expression
> out of all the available primary and composite expressions. Whenever the
> expression is changed, the tool would present a preview of what the code
> would look like under the refactoring represented by the new expression.
> The user can gradually refine the expression and instantly see the effects
> of those refinements on the code, until the refactoring is exactly as she
> wants it. The deliverable would be a library or commandline tool which
> could be integrated into plugins for different IDEs, plus one or two
> example plugins for popular IDEs.
>
> SWIG is a powerful and widely used tool for wrapping C and C++ APIs to
> make them available from within many different scripting languages. It has
> a built in C/C++ parser and customization is possible through language
> extensions. But in my opinion the SWIG codebase has unfortunately become
> poorly factored and difficult to adapt or extend. I propose a tool
> fulfilling broadly the same use cases as SWIG, but built upon LibClang,
> clean architecture, and modern C++. Customization could be provided by
> C++11 attributes. Of course achieving feature parity with SWIG in a single
> GSoC cycle would be laughably ambitious. But I think an achievable aim
> would be to support, say, classes at namespace scope, and functions and
> constants at namespace and class scope, simple function argument mapping,
> and one or two target scripting languages, and hope that the community can
> take that seed and continue to grow it.
>
> I'll be interested to see which, if any, of these ideas meet with your
> enthusiasm. :)
>
> Thanks for reading,
> Mat Sutcliffe
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/cfe-dev/attachments/20150327/9fe856a3/attachment.html>