[cdt-dev] C++ Hover Help

[Jeff Johnston <jjohnstn@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Has anybody successfully implemented C++ hover help/completion for 
member functions?

I have been looking into it to support the libstdc++ library 
documentation and have reached an impasse.

I am attempting to extend an existing ICHelpProvider extension.  I don't 
think the ICHelpProvider extension was ever meant to support C++ since 
it only passes the member name and does not give enough information to 
figure out the context (i.e. what class it is really from and what it's 
parameter signature is). 

To get around this problem, I created an interface that extends 
ICHelpInvocationContext and provides the IRegion of the call being 
hovered over.

For example,

   std::string *k = new string("abc");
   k->size();

Hovering over size, we can figure out from the TranslationUnit contents 
that size is being referenced by a pointer k and has no parameters.

Now to figure out what k points to.  This information can be found in 
the AST from the TranslationUnit that is already passed in the 
ICHelpInvocationContext (via the getAST methods).

A major snag I have run into is that it is taking far too long to get 
the AST.  I timed over 10 seconds debugging my simple C++ Hello world 
example which added the above 2 statements.  This is too long to expect 
a user to wait to get hover help.  I tried using the 
AST_SKIP_ALL_HEADERS and AST_SKIP_INDEXED_HEADERS but that resulted in a 
null IASTTranslationUnit.  Theoretically, could it not figure out that k 
points to an unknown type: std::string without looking at any headers?  
Obviously, this would not support macro expansion, but it would cover a 
lot of scenarios.  Just a thought.

Is there anything I could have done differently which would speed things 
up enough to be useful?

Am I trying to solve a problem already figured out by somebody else?

Thanks,

-- Jeff J.