Interesting. They’re talking about the compiler itself using the clang front end. That’s pretty bold and, really, the right thing to do.
But this is related. Visual Studio’s index is created by the compiler front end. There’s an article out there somewhere that talks about it. Because they haphazardly added in support for semantic analysis to the front end they’ve ended up with a pretty
hacked up architecture. They mentioned doing something new for upcoming releases. I guess we know now what that was.
BTW using clang for generating the source info is still the right thing to do. That’s independent of the fact we don’t have the resources to do that.
Doug.
Nathan,
It's ambiguously worded in the article, but to me it sounds like they may use clang for more than just compiling. Let me quote from the article:
"Visual C++ is comprised of several parts, including the Visual Studio IDE, the front-end compiler which generates an AST (Abstract Syntax
Tree) representing the content of the program, and a back-end compiler which reads the AST and generates executable code.
...
Microsoft’s new integration uses Clang in place of C1, but continues to use C2 for the back-end."
I guess we have to wait until it's released to find out more.
Sascha