[cdt-dev] CDT refactoring support Google SoC project

[Robert Gravina <robert@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hello Eclipse CDT developers!

I was browsing the Google SoC projects for this year and came across  
this Eclipse proposal:

"Add full refactoring support to CDT."

As it turns out, my masters project relates to software tools for C.  
I was actually planning to develop a C refactoring tool for Eclipse,  
and been looking into adding at least partial refactoring support to  
CDT for a number of reasons. Firstly, my professor has asked me look  
at ways of dealing with the C-pre-processor, and the truckload of  
problems it causes for software tools, and also to apply some of his  
previous work to creating new tools. Seeing as I have an interest in  
software design in general also, I thought building a refactoring  
tool would be a useful tool to test whatever techniques we develop.  
Secondly, there seems to be a dearth of open source C refactoring  
tools. There are few commercial implementations, and research  
projects, but I was unable to find any open source implementations  
which I could download and play around with (although recently  
XRefectory has released a free version). Thirdly, I really think CDT  
would really benefit from refactoring support - and obviously  
whomever proposed that topic does too! I understand why this hasn't  
been tackled yet - C, and C++, create a load of problems for  
refactoring tools that languages like Java don't - the pre-processor,  
pointers, difficulty in parsing. etc.

I would be interested in tackling this project, wanted to send this  
mail out too see if any CDT developers have any suggestions or  
comments, and if any work has been done on refactoring support thus  
far (apart from Rename, as useful as this is! Thanks!). I realise I'm  
cutting this a bit fine - the Google SoC deadline is only a few days  
away (March 26th) - but I only discovered this project by chance a  
few days ago!

Even if I don't do this as a Google SoC project, I will most likely  
be developing a C refactoring tool of some sort for Eclipse as part  
of my research project. Doing it as a SoC would mean that I can spend  
more time on the refactoring tool that I otherwise would (as much as  
I would love to just hack away on the tool itself, I do need *some*  
novel research contributions!), so it is a win-win situation for both  
of us. I'm still in the process of getting aquainted with previous  
work on the topic, and it seems one of the Gang of Four (Ralph  
Johnson) and one of his students has put a fair bit of work into this  
with CRefactory <https://netfiles.uiuc.edu/garrido/www/ 
CRefactory.html>. One very useful outcome of this is a collection of  
refactorings tailored to C - rename macro, group a set of variables  
in a new struct etc. I think this could form a solid basis for the  
design of a CDT refactoring pugin, or at least as a starting point.  
Also, I came across this CDT refactoring proposal from a couple of  
years ago, which also is useful to look at https://bugs.eclipse.org/ 
bugs/attachment.cgi?id=14995

I haven't looked into the specific problems C++ causes, and honestly  
I'm not the most experienced C++ developer, but I have been delighted  
to find some of things that bothered me about C have been addressed  
in C++ (and yes, of course, it's  object-oriented!!!)

Over the next few days I will work on an application for the Google  
SoC and a supporting website I can put additional information on.

Robert