[Haskell-cafe] C++ Parser?

[Christopher Brown]

Hi Everyone,

Thanks for everyone's kind responses: very helpful so far!

I fully appreciate and understand how difficult writing a C++ parser is. However I may need one for our new Paraphrase project, where I may be targeting C++ for writing a refactoring tool. Obviously I don't want to start writing one myself, hence I was asking if anyone new about an already existing implementation. 

Rose looks interesting, I'll check that out, thanks!

Chris.




On 24 Jan 2012, at 14:40, Jason Dagit wrote:

> On Tue, Jan 24, 2012 at 2:06 AM, Christopher Brown
> <cmb21 at st-andrews.ac.uk> wrote:
>> Hi,
>> 
>> I have stumbled across language-c on hackage and I was wondering if anyone is aware if there exists a full C++ parser written in Haskell?
> 
> I don't think one exists.  I've heard it's quite difficult to get
> template parsing working in an efficient manner.
> 
> My understanding is that "real" C++ compilers use the Edison Design
> Group's parser: http://www.edg.com/index.php?location=c_frontend
> 
> For example, the Intel C++ compiler uses the edg front-end:
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_C%2B%2B_Compiler
> 
> I thought even microsoft's compiler (which is surprisingly c++
> compliant) uses it but I can't find details on google about that.
> 
> There is at least one open source project using it, rose, so it's not
> unthinkingable to use it from Haskell: http://rosecompiler.org/
> 
> Rose has had working haskell bindings in the past but they have bit
> rotted a bit.  With rose you get support for much more than parsing
> C++.  You also get C and Fortran parsers as well as a fair bit of
> static analysis.  The downside is that rose is a big pile of C++
> itself and is hard to compile on some platforms.
> 
> If you made a BSD3 licensed, fully functional, efficient C++ parser
> that would be great.  If you made it so that it preserves comments and
> the input well enough to do source to source transformations
> (unparsing) that would be very useful.  I often wish I had rose
> implemented in Haskell instead of C++.
> 
> Jason