clang-DXR

As mentioned previously, the first thing I started doing was getting DXR to use libclang to build the indexing. As of right now, I have a tool which kind of works. In that it can successfully build a program but utterly fails to produce reliable SQL output due to constantly swallowed segfaults (I think). My test program uses cmake to build, so it "helpfully" hides the noise of what is actually going on, so debugging will have to wait until next week.

The main unexpected hurdle is that for all of the wonderful praise clang has had lavished on it, I have found it surprisingly difficult to use. I had expected to be able to do a more or less straightforward port of dxr.js, with some cosmetic changes to handle differences in naming, etc., between dehydra and libclang. That expectation is now hopelessly gone; libclang provides nothing near the clean API that dehydra does. For example, to get the fully-qualified name of a class, instead of being able to say type.name, I have to walk up the entire AST hierarchy of the class to find all of its containing classes and namespaces to do it myself. If I want to get one for a function (which, in C++, requires differentiating between overloads, so I need type parameters), I have to build my own type-to-string dumper. Indeed, no less than half of my code so far is merely trying to build the type names I need to dump out. In addition, it seems that the clang people are dismissive of an idea to include a higher level API than is currently present.

If you didn't notice from the links, by the way, dxr is now on github.