On Tue, Jul 16, 2013 at 11:01 PM, deadalnix <deadal...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wednesday, 17 July 2013 at 05:12:00 UTC, Timothee Cour wrote: > >> what's a non-full C front end? If it's not a real C front end it's gonna >> break with certain macros etc. Not good. >> >> > Macro are processed before parsing? No need for a full C frontend to > handle macros. > > > I see no point in re-implementing a C front end when we can simply use an >> existing one to do the job (eg clang). This would also allow to parse C++ >> just as well. >> > > When you only need a very limited part of the fronted, it make sense. Here > we don't need to parse function body for instance, and we can skip most of > semantic analysis (if not all ?). > you'd still need to parse C files recursively (textual inclusion...), handle different C function calling conventions, different C standards, you'd need a way to forward to dmd different C compiler options (include paths to standard / custom libraries), and eventually people will want to parse C++ as well anyways. That can be a lot of work. Whereas using existing tools takes much less effort and is less error prone.