[cfe-dev] Is it safe to cast-away constness to use Clang static analysis?

[Roman Popov via cfe-dev]

Well, after a couple of weeks of playing with developing toy Clang-based
tool I came to conclusion that it is better to create pointers to const AST
nodes.
For two reasons:
1) ast Matchers are widely used in practice. They are often more convenient
than writing custom ast visitors for every small subtree search.
And I don't want to do const_cast each time you use ast Matcher.
2)  Most standard C++ classes are mutable, so it's hard to explain
non-Clang developer that you omitting const here because object is
immutable by design

So it's easier to const than not to const...


2017-10-04 11:40 GMT-07:00 John McCall <rjmccall at apple.com>:

> On Oct 4, 2017, at 2:21 PM, Roman Popov <ripopov at gmail.com> wrote:
> In conclusion:
> Should AST matchers should return non-const pointers to comply with Clang
> coding standard for immutable objects?
>
>
> I think it is more likely than not that the Clang ASTs will gradually
> standardize on taking non-const pointers.  Given that AST matchers tend to
> create out-of-tree dependencies, I think it would be better for them to go
> ahead and work primarily with non-const pointers.
>
> If you want to do some of the work to make the ASTs traffic in non-const
> pointers, that would be good, too, although we should first get consensus
> that that's the direction we want to go in.
>
> John.
>
>
> 2017-10-04 11:14 GMT-07:00 John McCall via cfe-dev <cfe-dev at lists.llvm.org
> >:
>
>>
>> > On Oct 4, 2017, at 3:30 AM, Csaba Raduly via cfe-dev <
>> cfe-dev at lists.llvm.org> wrote:
>> >
>> > On Wed, Oct 4, 2017 at 2:20 AM, John McCall via cfe-dev
>> > <cfe-dev at lists.llvm.org> wrote:
>> >>
>> >> The AST is largely immutable by design, and the best solution would
>> probably
>> >> be to adopt what LLVM did to Type and just mass-refactor code to stop
>> >> passing around const pointers at all.
>> >
>> > If the AST is meant to be immutable, why not pass const
>> > {pointers,references} around?
>>
>> If the objects are actually immutable, const is just noise repeated
>> everywhere, because a non-const object is basically a useless type.
>>
>> John.
>> _______________________________________________
>> cfe-dev mailing list
>> cfe-dev at lists.llvm.org
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>>
>
>
>
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