[cfe-dev] Flag for generating LLVM IR from forward declarations

[Gianluca Stivan via cfe-dev]

Hi everyone,

I was playing around with the LLVM toolchain and it occurred to me that,
should I decide to target LLVM IR, it would be neat to have Clang generate
declarations from C header files for easier FFI. Someone seems to have had
my same idea [1] [2]. This is kind of the opposite of what other projects
have gone for, where they use libclang to parse header files to achieve the
same result [3].

Now, forward declaration generation is doable by patching CodeGenModule.cpp
(I kinda have a PoC working locally, except it generates *all* the forward
declarations, instead of just the ones from the header files I care about)

Is this something that you guys would be interested in merging into Clang
through a flag? Or what would the proper way to do this be?
I saw there's a `-femit-all-decls`, but it doesn't really emit all
declarations.

Apologies if this is a dumb idea, kinda new to the whole Clang thing :)!

Cheers,

-yawnt

[1]
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/24728901/clang-compiling-a-c-header-to-llvm-ir-bitcode
[2]
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/14032496/how-can-i-code-generate-unused-declarations-with-clang?noredirect=1&lq=1
[3] https://github.com/tjfontaine/node-ffi-generate
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