[cfe-dev] Reflection/metaparsing implem

[David Blaikie via cfe-dev]

On Mon, Nov 11, 2019 at 1:01 PM James Y Knight <jyknight at google.com> wrote:

> On Mon, Nov 11, 2019 at 3:03 PM David Blaikie via cfe-dev <
> cfe-dev at lists.llvm.org> wrote:
>
>> I think that'd still be a pretty hard sell - Clang's APIs and AST are
>> volatile & intentionally so. People writing against the Clang APIs
>> themselves with things like clang-tidy are aware of that. If we sold this
>> as a feature to general C++ users, I don't think there would be a way to
>> sufficiently communicate how volatile this will be - and end up backing
>> ourselves into a corner & limiting the ability to change Clang.
>>
>
> Does Clang's AST API _need_ to be unstable in order to keep up with
> language changes, or is it just a convenience?
>

I imagine with sufficient heroics the AST could be maintained for a
particular version - and /probably/ version-over-version (so the C++23 AST
was backwards compatible with the C++20 AST, etc). In the same way that the
language itself is mostly backwards compatible version over version.


> Is this concern indicative of problems that a standardized AST API would
> also have, or is unique to Clang's current API?
>

The concern is mostly indicative of a very high fidelity API - the lower
level/more bare the API, the more brittle it'll be to changes (both
refactoring improvements to Clang, and necessary changes to accommodate new
language features). Standardizing something a little higher level could
provide a lot more flexibility under the hood.
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