Clang refactoring tools and clang-cl on Windows

Clang Frontend
1

Hi cfe-dev,

I'm interested in using the Clang refactoring tools on Windows code. We have a large multi-platform codebase, and while we use Clang to compile a lot of it, we still have quite a bit of Windows-specific code which we compile with MSVC. Initial results refactoring the Clang-compatible code were good, so I'm hopeful I can parse most of the MSVC-specific stuff as well. Is it possible to use clang-cl somehow as the frontend for the refactoring tools? I can get a compilation database with the CL.exe flags pretty easily, but translating that to clang flags across our whole codebase is likely to be challenging. I'm open to modifying the refactoring tools a bit/writing my own tools if that's what it takes.

Thanks!
Liam

2

Some people did a lot of work making both clang-tidy and clang-format easy to use on windows.

clang-tidy
https://youtu.be/BAkdRY9l5pI

https://github.com/Caphyon/clang-power-tools

clang-format
https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=LLVMExtensions.ClangFormat

3

Hi Liam,

I think this should basically work fine. In Chromium, we’ve used clang tooling to do various things, and we use cl.exe style flags on Windows. https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/lkcr/docs/clang_tool_refactoring.md has some words on it; https://cs.chromium.org/chromium/src/tools/clang/scripts/run_tool.py?q=run_tool.py&sq=package:chromium&dr=C&l=7 is the run_tool.py that’s referenced there.

Under the hood, I believe the way this works is that libTooling looks for either --driver-mode (maybe here? http://llvm-cs.pcc.me.uk/tools/clang/lib/Tooling/Tooling.cpp#178) or for the name of the clang binary in the comp db.

4

Well that's good news! Thanks everyone, I'll give that a try.

Liam