Kate/KDevelop Sprint 2014: Let There Be Clang (February 04, 2014)
Time flies… The extremely productive hack sprint at the friendly Blue Systems office in Barcelona is over for more than a week. I haven’t had time to blog about the last days yet which I hereby make good for!
I spent a lot of time at the sprint polishing the KDevelop Clang plugin. A up-to-now semi-secretly developed language plugin based on clang which will replace our current C++ language support in KDevelop in the long-run.
Code completion ofstd::string in a std::vector.
Showing a clang-generated warning inside the editor.
Nested clang diagnostics with browsing support.
KDevelop’s current C++ plugin
But a bit of history first: KDevelop’s current C++ language plugin can pull off what it does by essentially implementing (parts of) the C++ standard. We have our own C++ parser, we have our own implementation of the C++ template mechanism, we have our own share of “compiler bugs”, …. It should not surprise anyone that this is a maintenance nightmare. And indeed, with C++11 and the wealth of changes it came with our language simply fails in many areas. The current codebase is big (~55k sloc) and adding support for complicated features such as variadic templates or constexpr is extremely hard and fragile. So instead of doing that, my colleague Olivier JG started looking into using clang of LLVM fame instead. It promises an API for third-party tools to steer a C/C++/Objective-C compiler to their needs. Its the magic bullet which we waited for, and which did not exist back when KDevelop 4.0 was started initially.