Re: clang vs free software

[joakim]

Rüdiger Sonderfeld <address@hidden> writes:

> On Tuesday 21 January 2014 10:34:01 John Yates wrote:
>> That really does not answer David's question.  If you read it carefully he
>> called out "features that require an installed clang to work".  That is the
>> crux of the tension here.  While the most obvious manifestation of clang is
>> as a C/C++ compiler very similar to gcc it is also much more.  That is
>> because it is architected as suite of libraries intended to be integrated
>> into more environments than just a compiler:
>> 
>> http://clang.llvm.org/features.html#libraryarch> 
>> http://clang.llvm.org/features.html#ideintegration> 
>> Tooling for analyzing and manipulating C/C++ is simply a space that gcc is
>> not addressing.  Based on its architecture it likely never will.
>> 
>> There exist now various packages integrating emacs will elements of clang.
>>  These packages are not supporting clang as alternative compiler.  Rather
>> by exploiting clang interfaces that have no gcc analog they offer exciting
>> IDE-like features.
>
> GCC provides a plugin interface now which can be used to extract information 
> about the source.  I started writing a plugin and Emacs interface based on 
> that.  It can show the callgraph, jump to definition, and show some 
> information about symbols.  You simply add it to your normal compiler call.  
> But I didn't get very far and it requires a patched version of the gcc-python 
> plugin.
>
> I hope I'll find enough time to continue working on it.  Maybe Clang provides 
> better integration.  But without an FFI it would have to be linked into 
> Emacs.  
> And GCC is the main compiler I use anyway.

Interesting. Do you know if the interfaces you use are also provided via
gnome object introspection? Then I would love to try it out using the
Emacs Xwidget branch, which provides an attempt at a GIR bridge for emacs.

>
> (Well I actually started by writing a GCC plugin to generate ETAG files
>
> https://github.com/ruediger/gcc-etags
>
> But it got disappointing when I had to throw away a lot of the nice 
> information that GCC provides and generate the simplified ETAG format.)
>
> Regards,
> Rüdiger
>

-- 
Joakim Verona