Replace cppast with parsing JSON from clang

[saraedum]

Since cppast is being discontinued (standardese/cppast#173) we'll eventually need to find another library to base standardese on.

[deadlocklogic]

Since this library relies heavily on cppast, have you considered maintaining a fork of cppast just for bug fixes?
Because migrating to parsing from JSON means a backend from scratch which needs more efforts.

[foonathan]

If you want, I can also transfer ownership of cppast to the standardese organization.

[deadlocklogic]

For me, objectively speaking cppast in its current state is stable (the main branch).
The only challenges for a maintainer imo would be:
1- Fixing minor bugs (I opened few of those).
2- Fixing failing tests on newer libclang versions (Not too many like 6 as I remember correctly).
I was heavily relying on this library, had few problems whatsoever, of course not considering its limitations.

[saraedum]

@foonathan sorry, missed your reply here. Yes, I guess transferring ownership makes sense. standardese does not see a lot of development at the moment, but cppast is a dependency and there are not that many other projects using it I would guess.

[deadlocklogic]

@saraedum I have a nice project depending on cppast, which I begun its migration to another library, and which I will open source soon. If you plan on maintaining, I can help you with bug report, and some fixes because I have some experience using cppast.

[saraedum]

@deadlocklogic I would be very happy about your help with cppast. Please let me know if you need my support with anything.

[deadlocklogic]

@saraedum Will the project be active again? One important milestone would be supporting newer versions of clang.
If so I will be reporting bugs and fixes.
👍

[saraedum]

I am not the maintainer of cppast but maybe we should just fork it into the standardese project and eventually @foonathan is probably going to transfer ownership to here.

I am perfectly happy to merge PRs that look remotely reasonable if that makes your life easier.

[foonathan]

I will transfer ownership during the holidays, I've been very busy the past couple of weeks.

[foonathan]

I can't transfer ownership, you need to delete the cppast fork first.

[saraedum]

@foonathan ok, I deleted the fork.

[foonathan]

Done.