How to parse a collection of c++ header files?

Question

I am working in a project and I want to do reflection in C++ so after research I found that the best way is to parse header files to get abstract syntax tree in XML format and use it in reflection. I tried many tools but none of them compatible with visual c++ 2008 or visual c++ 2010 like coco, cint, gccxml. please replay soon

Answer 1

Our C++ front end is capable of parsing many dialects of C++, including GNU and MS. It builds compiler data structures for ASTs and symbol tables with the kind of information needed to "do reflection" for C++. It is rather trivial to export the parse tree as an XML document. The symbol table information could be exported as XML by walking the symbol structure.

People always seem to want the AST and symbol table data in XML format, I guess under the assumption that they can read it into a DOM structure or manipulate it with XSLT. There are two serious flaws to this idea: 1) the sheer volume of the XML data is enormous, and generating/rereading it simply adds a lot of time 2) that having these structures available will make "easy" to do ...something....

What we think people really want to do is to analyze the code, and/or transform the code (typically based on an analysis). That requires that the tool, whatever it is, provide access to the program structure in a way that makes is "easier" to analyze and, well, transform. For instance, if you decide to modify the AST how will you regenerate the source text?

We have built the DMS Software Reengineering Toolkit to provide exactly the kind of general purpose support to parse, analyze, transform, prettyprint ("regenerate source"). DMS has front ends for a wide variety of languages (C++, C, Java, COBOL, Python, ...) and provides the set of standard services useful to build custom analyzers/transformations on code. At the risk of being bold, we have spent a long time thinking about implementing useful mechanisms to cover this set of tasks, in the same way that MS has spent a long time determining what should be in Windows. You can try to replicate this mechanism but expect it to be a huge cost (we have been working on DMS for 15 years), or you can close your eyes and pretend you can hack together enough to do what you imagine you need to do (mostly what you'll discover is that it isn't enough in practice).

Because of this general need for "program manipulation services", our C++ front end is hosted on top of DMS.

DMS with the C++ front end have been used to build a variety of standard software engineering tools (test coverage, profilers) as well as carry out massive changes to code (there's a paper at the webiste on how DMS was used to massively rearchitect aircraft mission software).

EDIT 7/8/2014: Our Front end now handles full C++11, and parts of C++14, including control and dataflow for functions/procedures/methods.

Answer 2

Visual Studio already parses all code in your project (IntelliSense feature). You can use Visual C++ Code Model for access.