Re: Code assistance with GCC

[Basile Starynkevitch <basile at starynkevitch dot net>]

Tomohiro Matsuyama wrote:
> Hi, all
>
> I have been working on implementing a tool-set of code assistance called 
> GCCSense, which enables code-completion for C/C++ in editors or a terminal.
>
> http://cx4a.org/software/gccsense/
>
> GCCSense depends on its own GCC which has special options for code 
> assistance such like -code-completion-at:
>
>     $ cat
>     #include <string>
>     int main()
>     {
>         std::string s;
>         s.
>     }
>     $ # Print completion candidates at line 5 and column 7 of a.cc
>     $ g++-code-assist -fsyntax-only -code-completion-at=a.cc:5:7 a.c
>
> Now, I have the following problems:
>
> * Hard to build that GCC for users
> * Hard to maintain that GCC for me
>
> Plugin might be a solution for them. Finally, however, I found that 
> there is no proper plugin entrances for code assistance. As you may 
> understand if you read an attached patch, GCCSense needs to handle 
> quickly a special token for code-completion after particular tokens such 
> as "." and "->" in parser phase.
>
> Is there any good solution for this ?
> Or could you implement such plugin entrances for code assistance ?
>
> Thanks.
> Tomohiro Matsuyama


I did suggest (in a previous private emaol) to Tomohiro to consider 
making his g++-code-assist  a proper GCC plugin. I even dared suggesting 
him to make it a GCC MELT module (see 
http://gcc.gnu.org/wiki/MiddleEndLispTranslator for more about GCC MELT).

However, I am not sure to understand why Tomohiro needs to hack the GCC 
parser itself. I was thinking that he might instead write a plugin which 
works at the Generic/TREE (or even perhaps  Gimple) level.

What do other people think?

Regards.

--
Basile STARYNKEVITCH         http://starynkevitch.net/Basile/
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