[cfe-dev] Source to source transformation w/ comments

[David Blaikie via cfe-dev]

Generally roundtripping through ASTs is not something that's
encouraged/reliable for reasons such as this. Most tools doing source
transformations do so by editing the original code, rather than producing a
new derived piece of code.

On Fri, May 6, 2016 at 7:31 AM, Andre Vehreschild via cfe-dev <
cfe-dev at lists.llvm.org> wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> I am working on a project to rework a given program having a large code
> base. While using Clang's fine and elaborate ways to understand and
> massage an AST, I am missing a way to parse and transfer comments. I
> have seen some efforts so far to get doxygen comments for methods and
> so on. But what about the comments that document the working of
> functions, i.e., all the comment that are in the .cpp files?
>
> Is there any support on this?
>
> What would be a good way to get them transfered? A new AST node on
> stmt-level to refer to a comment in the SourceManager, i.e., quite light
> weight? Or are there other loose ends that I can attach to?
>
> Because I am constructing the transformed code in a bottom-up way
> (bottom being the leaves of the AST), and am just streaming the result
> into a stringstream, I can't traverse the resulting code a second time
> and inject the comments while looking for source locations.
>
> Furthermore would it be appreciated to have a way of control on the
> transformation process, i.e. tell the clang-tool that for a certain
> routine it should do something specific. I.e. a directive should be
> available. Any thoughts on this?
>
> I am willing to develop and provide patches to get that functionality,
> but for this I like know a design that would be well perceived and has
> chances to make it into clang, i.e., not to waste the effort.
>
> - Andre
> --
> Andre Vehreschild * Email: vehre ad gmx dot de
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