Compiling code with the Clang API
Have you tried Clang yet? Clang is an open-source compiler, under active development, that aims to replace GCC for compiling C, C++, and Objective-C. Compared to GCC, Clang is faster, while generating comparably fast code, and prints more useful error messages.
Clang is also better for developers who want to compile code programmatically. Unlike GCC, Clang is designed to be both a tool and an API. That makes Clang’s source code easier to understand and reuse. And, for those of us working on projects incompatible with GCC’s GPL license, it’s good to know that Clang is distributed under the BSD license.
Kosada is working on a cool new project that’s built on top of Clang and its underlying framework, LLVM. While using Clang for this project, I’ve been pleased to see how simple it is to write code that builds other code. Simple in retrospect, anyway! The code I wrote turned out to be simple, but it took lots of digging through the Clang source code to figure out what to write. So here’s my first contribution to the Clang community: two examples of using the Clang API to build code programmatically.