invoking clang lexer + parser only

Clang Frontend
1

Hi everyone,

I am writing a syntax checker for a new language using the clang front-end. I have added some keywords and some grammar rules, but I don't know how to invoke the tools down to the level of parsing only. I am merely interested in checking the correctness of syntax at the moment.

I tried ParseAST(), but that returns a NULL pointer for the new type definitions, since their semantics are not defined. What other option do I have?

I would appreciate your kind help.

Ali

2

You could use clang’s -fsyntax-only command-line argument to perform only syntactic and semantic analysis steps. There are some other tips here:

http://clang.llvm.org/docs/InternalsManual.html#AddingExprStmt

3

So basically I need to add the semantics and AST nodes for my new expression as well, because -“fsyntax-only” uses those.
I read somewhere that adding an attribute has the advantage of propagating through the code, and I might not therefore need to add AST support. Is that right? In general would it be easier to accomplish syntax checking by adding some attributes?

Thanks for you help,
Ali