CODEWITHSUNDEEP
clangabstract-syntax-tree
Oeufcoque Penteano
Oeufcoque Penteano

Reputation: 603

How to use Clang to obtain ASTs on the current versions?

I have been trying to obtain ASTs from Clang but I have not been successfully so far. I found a one year old question here at stack that mentions about two other ways to obtain the ast using Clang which are:

./llvmc -cc1 -ast-dump file.c

./llvmc -cc1 -ast-print file.c

On this question doxygen is mentioned and a representation where an ast is given but I am mostly looking for one on some textual form such as XML so that further analysis can be performed.

lastly there was another question here on stack about exactly XML import but it was discontinued for several reasons also mentioned.

My question thus is, which version and how can I use it from the console to obtain ast related information for a given code in C? I believe this to be a very painless one line command code like those above but the documentation index did not refer anything about ast from as much as I have read and the only one at llvmc I found was about writing an AST by hand which is not really what I am looking for.

I tried all of the commands above but they all already fail on version 2.9 and I already found out llvm changes a whole lot between each version.

Thank you.

Upvotes: 3

Views: 1008

Answers (1)

Ira Baxter
Ira Baxter

Reputation: 95344

OP says "open to other suggestions as well".

He might consider our DMS Software Reengineering Toolkit with its C Front End.

While it would be pretty easy to exhibit a C AST produced by this, it is easier to show an ObjectiveC AST [already at SO] produced by DMS using the same C front end (ObjectiveC is a dialect of C). See https://stackoverflow.com/a/10749970/120163 DMS can produce an XML equivalent of this, too.

We don't recommend exporting trees as text, because real trees for real code are simply enormous and are poorly manipulated as text or XML objects in our experience. One usually needs machinery beyond parsing. See my discussion about Life After Parsing

Upvotes: 3

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