[cfe-dev] Rewriting modified named declarations

[Jon Reeves via cfe-dev]

Hi cfe-dev!

I'm definitely a noob to clang development but I'm enjoying getting to know
the various APIs and trying to transition from playing around to doing some
useful work.

I'm doing my best to self-serve wherever possible, but there are a couple
of things I've run into where I could really use some guidance from people
who are more experienced here. The first of these is in the broad category
of "re-serializing" (possibly modified) code from AST nodes without
strictly relying on the original source code text (as in the case of the
rewriter classes as I understand them).

As a concrete but probably contrived example, let's say you've used your
favorite AST visitor class to visit a named declaration that is a two
dimensional array of function pointers. In code it looks something like
this:

void (*twoDimCallbacks[3][3])(void);

The AST node you'll get from this is a NamedDecl type, where you can ask
for its string name (which will yield "twoDimCallbacks" as a string), and
its original qualified type, on which you can then call
getAsString(), which will give you "void (*[3][3])(void)".

Now let's say you want to modify and rewrite this declaration into some
totally unrelated stream. Maybe you're trying to create some support
functions that aren't strict re-writes of the original code. Essentially
what you want is a function in your tool that looks like this:

void serializeNewNamedDecl(std::ostream &stream, std::string &name,
QualType declType);

If you didn't have to support arrays or function pointers, implementing
this function would actually be somewhat trivial, since all of the type
specifiers would just be on the left side. You could do something like:

stream << declType.getAsString() << " " << name;

To do this with arrays and function pointers though, you have to write code
with some semantic understanding of the type declaration and figure out
exactly where the name should go. It seems to me like this must already
exist somewhere in the various clang libraries.

And so after much typing, I arrive at my question: what is the "clangiest"
way to do this? Is the answer really just to write a custom serializer? Is
it to do a search and replace on the original source code line where the
original NamedDecl was found? What if we want to actually modify the type
in some way? The common search and replace technique breaks down here.
Is there a class that can generate a new NamedDecl and pretty print it?

Apologies if this has already been covered somewhere in the history of this
forum. Appreciate whatever response anyone is willing to formulate.

Thanks in advance!
-Jon Reeves
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