Re: -fdump-translation-unit-xml

[Matt Austern <austern at apple dot com>]

On Saturday, September 28, 2002, at 11:01 AM, Lorenzo Delana wrote:

> If you try to parse the result to `-fdump-translation-unit' you meet 
> some
> problems specially for the question about where a string end, etc..
> This problem was addressed in the past by someone in this list...
Not a direct response, but this reminded me of something
I'd been meaning to bring up before...

-fdump-translation-unit is very useful, but I'd describe it more
as human-parsable than as human-readable.  You can step
through it by hand, but it's essentially impossible to use it to
understand anything about tree structure at a glance.

At Apple, we've developed an alternative tree dumper that's
less useful for reading by machine, but much more human
readable.  We've found our alternative tree dumper to be very
useful for debugging.

Is there any interest in an alternative tree dumper?  If so, we'd
be very happy to talk some more about it, to show some
examples of the tree dumps it produces, and to clean up the
code for a patch.

And just to state the obvious: we don't think of this as a
replacement for -fdump-translation-unit.  We think of the two
tree dumpers as complementary.

			--Matt