openInWorld

Now we make use of the client data to track the indent level.  The recursive call to clang_visitChildren() seems a bit of an anti-pattern to use with a visitor – presumably a new visitor is created each call.   However that’s how it was done in a few tutorials I found and it does provide local storage for each nextLevel variable for the purpose of this demonstration. Continue reading →

Okay, so we’ve got most of the parts ready. In the last part we managed to load the AST. Now lets do something useful with it. Traversing the tree is done uses a visitor pattern that supplies cursors to a callback function that define locations in the tree.  To the original C code from part 3 we add: the callback function, which I’ve called acceptCursorCallback(); and the callout function clang_visitChildren(), which traverses the tree and invokes the callback function for each node it visits. Continue reading →

In the last part we learnt how to get the version string of the library.  That was good to prove it basically works, and also to develop our first C type “CXString“. Now we want to Pharo to process some C code.  Baby steps with `libclang`: Walking an abstract syntax tree provided a good introductory tutorial to using libclang but was a bit C++ oriented, which is not so suitable for Pharo’s FFI.  A pure C interface is easier, so I adapted that tutorial with help from sabottenda’s libclang-sample ASTVisitor. Continue reading →

This is my first exposure to using Pharo’s FFI, so before diving in to process some AST, lets try something simpler to gain familiarity with the library.  Something real simple… 
no parameters and just returning a string. The function clang_getClangVersion() seems to fit the bill.  First lets see how it works in pure-C. Continue reading →

Table of contents

• Part 1 – Preamble
• Part 2 – Simple call out, string return
• Part 3 – Loading an AST
• Part 4 – AST walking with visitors and callbacks
• Part 5 – Client data and recursive visitor/callbacks

Background

I wanted to better understand the opensmalltalk-vm that Pharo runs on.  I started to manually chart and compare the C code between platforms, which was insightful but tedious and error prone.  What I needed was to automatically process these files.  Clang is a C language front-end for the LLVM compiler, designed to be integrated into external projects.  Libclang provides an interface suitable for the Pharo FFI, but I’d never used FFI before.  From a distance FFI had seemed somewhat daunting and complex, but it turns out reasonably straight forward.  I’m documenting my experience in the form of this tutorial that I can refer back to, and perhaps shines a newbie light on things that may encourage other FFI neophytes to give it a go. Continue reading →