Thanks for writing this, it's very impressive!

[GavinRay97]

I have just built the lib and seen the generated output in build/examples/geom, this is really impressive!
The code is fairly concise + easy to read as well 😃

One question I had from browsing the source -- I notice you use an ASTConsumer instead of a RecursiveASTVisitor. Is this easier?

Have been investigating doing some codegen from C++ headers and would be curious to hear your opinion

[spaceotter]

I'm not some kind of expert on libclang, I had not heard of RecursiveASTVisitor so thanks for the tip. The project already explores the declarations recursively in the specific way it needs to so I'm not sure I would change it. Note that the FrontendAction uses an ASTConsumer - if you don't use the FrontendAction you may end up with the headache of setting up a compiler instance manually (see here) or it won't find the standard system headers. In terms of developing with clang I haven't found a better approach than just using your IDE on the whole project and poking through the code, and experimenting. The documentation is too sparse to be of much use.

[GavinRay97]

Ahh got it -- I am in much the same boat. The documentation I agree is terrible.
You're pretty much left to your devices, and even searching online you cannot find much =(

You might find this useful though, this is the a class where you declare which kinds of nodes you want to visit and it extends FrontendAction with a recursive visitor for them that you can choose to either break/continue on each node:

https://clang.llvm.org/docs/RAVFrontendAction.html

class FindNamedClassVisitor
  : public RecursiveASTVisitor<FindNamedClassVisitor> {
public:
  explicit FindNamedClassVisitor(ASTContext *Context)
    : Context(Context) {}

  bool VisitCXXRecordDecl(CXXRecordDecl *Declaration) {
    if (Declaration->getQualifiedNameAsString() == "n::m::C") {
      FullSourceLoc FullLocation = Context->getFullLoc(Declaration->getBeginLoc());
      if (FullLocation.isValid())
        llvm::outs() << "Found declaration at "
                     << FullLocation.getSpellingLineNumber() << ":"
                     << FullLocation.getSpellingColumnNumber() << "\n";
    }
    return true;
  }

private:
  ASTContext *Context;
};

class FindNamedClassConsumer : public clang::ASTConsumer {
public:
  explicit FindNamedClassConsumer(ASTContext *Context)
    : Visitor(Context) {}

  virtual void HandleTranslationUnit(clang::ASTContext &Context) {
    Visitor.TraverseDecl(Context.getTranslationUnitDecl());
  }
private:
  FindNamedClassVisitor Visitor;
};