The future of gideon

[Philippe FREMY]

> -- Code Completion --

> Unfortunately, C++ is very difficult to parse. I did a bit 
> of searching on the subject and found some useful info like:
> 
> http://www.tardis.ed.ac.uk/~adb/compilers/cplusplus.html
> 
> And a post from Eray to the sourcenav mailing list, with 
> promising responses:
> 
> http://sources.redhat.com/ml/sourcenav/2002-q1/msg00023.html
> 
> Eray, what is the status of making an API out of sourcenav? 
> Robe, and others working/thinking about such things: what are your
thoughts? 
> Personally, I think we must find or join forces with others who have 
> working C++ parsers or who follow similar goals. Sourcenav looks promising
in this respect.

Indeed. Since I have been looking around for a C++ parser for my refactoring
project, I can share my results with you:

Sourcenav offers two possibilities:
1. use their parser to generate their database and then use the database
2. use their code to generate our own C++ parser.

The first approach guarantees a stable long tested database of symbol with
optimal reconstructing. However, it will be harder to modify if you don't
find what you are looking for inside the database. For refactoring for
example, I need the variable declarations and a more precise usage info of
everything. But for code completion and class-browsing, you have more than
you need.

The second approach is possible because all the sourcenavigator parsers
calls functions like sn_insert_symbol and sn_insert_xref to update the
symbol database. Sourcenav's implementation calls the database but if you
provide these functions, you can do whatever you want in the calls.
See http://sourcenav.sourceforge.net/online-docs/progref/addparsers.html for
slightly more info.

Sourcenavigator's doc provides very little info on how to run the parser
itself.

The other interesting projects I found:
http://www.csg.is.titech.ac.jp/~chiba/openc++.html
http://www.site.uottawa.ca:4333/dmm/index.html
http://www.cs.utoronto.ca/~simsuz/cascon2001/workshop.html
http://www.empathy.com/pccts/download.html
http://www.gccxml.org/HTML/Index.html

Most of them are unappropriate for full C++ parsing like I need, but
perfectly ok for completion and class-browsing.

	Philippe
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