[cfe-dev] Loading plugins into libclang

[Benjamin Kramer via cfe-dev]

On Tue, Mar 1, 2016 at 5:40 PM, Benjamin Kramer <benny.kra at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Mar 1, 2016 at 4:37 PM, Kevin Funk <kfunk at kde.org> wrote:
>> On Tuesday, March 01, 2016 02:16:52 PM Benjamin Kramer via cfe-dev wrote:
>>> Hi everyone,
>>>
>>> in my quest to get clang-tidy integrated into your favorite editor
>>> (via ycm) I'm hitting one major roadblock. I'm piggybacking on the
>>> existing plugin mechanism which gives me both a way to add extra
>>> Actions to the parse process and hand flags to the plugin for
>>> configuration. This works well for (most of) clang-tidy as it really
>>> just emits diagnostics and FixIts.
>>
>> Heya,
>>
>> did you see my patch here?
>>   http://reviews.llvm.org/D15729
>>
>> This makes it possible to load Clang plugins in libclang by simply passing
>> additional compiler arguments to libclang's clang_parseTranslation function.
>>
>>> However, loading a plugin into libclang isn't easily possible because
>>> there it doesn't export all the clang symbols.
>>
>> I'm not sure I understand this issue. Could you elaborate?
>>
>> A Clang plugin is supposed to be linked against all necessary Clang/LLVM
>> libraries already, isn't it? So it should be possible to dlopen the plugin
>> just fine.
>
> Oh I see. I was holding CMake wrong, actually linking all of Clang and
> Clang-tidy into the same .so works. This is a bit scary to me because
> there are now two clang copies around but it seems to work fine.
> Thanks!

Nope. Didn't test it properly. This worked because I was in a debug
build with shared libraries. In that setup everything magically works.
A normal Release build doesn't work at all. By default libclang
doesn't export any non-libclang functions. When I remove the exports
list I get scary errors like

: CommandLine Error: Option 'debug' registered more than once!
LIBCLANG FATAL ERROR: inconsistency in registered CommandLine option

because I have two copies of clang in the same address space.

- Ben

>>> Putting all the clang
>>> symbols into the plugin doesn't work either because you'll get
>>> duplicate command line flag registration and everything. My current
>>> hack is to statically link clang-tidy into libclang. This works but
>>> creates an ugly (optional) dependency from libclang into
>>> clang-tools-extra.
>>>
>>> Is there any other way to extend libclang without actually modifying
>>> libclang itself?
>>>
>>> - Ben
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> cfe-dev mailing list
>>> cfe-dev at lists.llvm.org
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>>
>> --
>> Kevin Funk | kfunk at kde.org | http://kfunk.org