Re: [cdt-core-dev] Open C++ Parser

[Tom Tromey <tromey@xxxxxxxxxx>]

>>>>> "Doug" == Schaefer, Doug <dschaefer@xxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:

I have a few comments and questions about parsing.

Doug> We're having a lot of fun here porting the Open C++ parser to
Doug> Java for potential use in the CDT.

Is writing it in Java a requirement?


A long time ago, Red Hat (and before it Cygnus) had a product called
Source Navigator that included C and C++ parsers (and a bunch of other
ones).  These live on in a sourceforge project:

    http://sourceforge.net/projects/sourcenav/

Now, my recollection was that the C++ parser had big problems.  But
this thread seems to indicate that really it is ok:

    http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?thread_id=877927&forum_id=8966

Also see the "SourceBase" spin-off project:

    http://sourcebase.sourceforge.net/

It may be worth looking into these to see if they are usable.

In S-N each parser was an independent program that wrote its results
to a database; S-N itself did queries in this database to get the
information it wanted.  If the CDT did this then I think there
wouldn't be a GPL problem.  (Or perhaps the licensing is changeable.
That could be looked into.)

I think it would make sense to at least investigate this option.
One benefit is that other projects appear to use this code, so
maintenance could be shared.


The S-N parsers, as a rule, were not precise.  They didn't require
grammatically correct programs, but rather would generally recover
from errors and continue on.  I believe the rationale for this was
two-fold.  First, given the presence of the preprocessor, it was very
difficult to do a precise parse.  Second, this meant that S-N could be
used on code that didn't compile -- this is an actual advantage.  I
don't really have any more details than this, though I could try to
dig some up if anybody is interested.

Tom