sheijk / clang-lookup

clang-lookup is a very simple CLI tool for navigation of C and C++ code bases
using the semantic analysis engine of the Clang compiler. Pass it a file, line
and column number on the command line and it will print warning/errors and a
line describing the location where the symbol at the given source location is
defined.

clang-lookup is designed to work out-of-the-box without any setup. The
disadvantage is that each invocation has to re-parse the given file. For large
projects some of the alternatives might work better (see end of this file).

Building
========

To build you need to put a compiled version of LLVM 2.9 and Clang 2.9 into the
llvm directory. After configuring and building you should have the LLVM and
Clang binaries in llvm/Release/bin or llvm/Debug/bin.

Use "make" to create a release build of clang-extract and "make DEBUG=1" for a
debug build.

Usage
=====

Call clang_lookup like this: "./build/clang_lookup.sh file line column". It will
output a list of compiler diagnostics (warnings, errors). If the symbol at the
given location could be resolved it will print a line describing the location of
it's definition as it's last output. The format is as follows

location=file:line:column

for example

location=~/project/my_lib.h:20:6

If the symbol could not be resolved clang_lookup will print "location=" and
return a non-zero error code.

Todo
====

- add reasonable error handling
- add automated tests
  (using tests dir, pre-set locations and results)
- fix C++ support
  (use clang_createTranslationUnitFromSourceFile + clang_command_line_args)
- add customizable function to setup clang arguments (include paths, etc.)
- pass compiler errors and warnings on to flymake
- support reading source from stdin
- persistent/cached data base(?)

More info
=========

Send feedback, bug reports, patches etc. to the following super-obfuscated
mail address: jrehders *at* gmx *dot* net

https://github.com/sheijk/clang-lookup

http://llvm.org
http://clang.llvm.org

Other tools offering similar functionality.

http://blog.wuwon.id.au/2011/10/vim-plugin-for-navigating-c-with.html
https://github.com/Sarcasm/irony-mode

Both create a persistant index on disk. This can be faster but requires a bit of
setup.

http://ctags.sourceforge.net/
http://goog-gtags.sourceforge.net/
http://www.gnu.org/s/global/
http://cscope.sourceforge.net/

Mostly depend on regexps or similar hacks. They all are useful tools even for
large projects. Their indexing is less accurate than basing such information on
the compiler's analysis, though.