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Re: [cdt-dev] Microsoft Visual Studio to support clang front-end

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.

From: <cdt-dev-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxx> on behalf of Sascha Konrad <konradsa@xxxxxxxxx>
Reply-To: "CDT General developers list." <cdt-dev@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Friday, October 23, 2015 at 9:56 AM
To: "CDT General developers list." <cdt-dev@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: Re: [cdt-dev] Microsoft Visual Studio to support clang front-end

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


On Fri, Oct 23, 2015 at 2:35 AM, Nathan Ridge <zeratul976@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Interesting article about Microsoft Visual Studio starting to support
> the clang compiler front-end for parsing code:
>
> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/10/21/microsoft_promises_clang_for_windows_in_november_visual_c_update/
>
> Any thoughts of doing something similar for Eclipse CDT? It would
> alleviate a lot of the parsing and indexing issues of complex code
> frequently encountered, and now with C++ evolving more rapidly than
> ever before, it may save some work in the long run.

The MSVC feature described in the article concerns using Visual Studio to _build_ code using clang, much as CDT is already able to build using clang.

It does not mean MSVC will use clang to power IDE features such as code navigation, code completion, or semantic highlighting. That would be a very large undertaking for them, as it would be for CDT.

Regards,
Nate

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