Re: [boost] Scalpel: a Spirit&Wave-powered C++ source code analysis library

Subject: Re: [boost] Scalpel: a Spirit&Wave-powered C++ source code analysis library
From: OvermindDL1 (overminddl1_at_[hidden])
Date: 2010-09-03 21:50:13

On Fri, Sep 3, 2010 at 4:22 PM, Florian Goujeon
<florian.goujeon_at_[hidden]> wrote:
>> [1] Scalpel appears to be under an LGPL license, which is not
>> Boost-compatible.
>
> In the beginning, Scalpel was under GPL. Hartmut Kaiser, Joel de
> Guzman and some fellows of mine convinced me to switch under a more
> liberal software license. Then, I've switched to LGPL.
> If one day Scalpel is accepted into Boost, I'll release it under the
> BSL without any hesitation.

LGPL is still too restrictive for single binary distributions, Clang
is under an MIT style license.

On Fri, Sep 3, 2010 at 4:57 PM, Dave Abrahams <dave_at_[hidden]> wrote:
> On Fri, Sep 3, 2010 at 6:22 PM, Florian Goujeon
> <florian.goujeon_at_[hidden]> wrote:
>> All competition is stimulating. It's beneficial for everyone. All
>> competitors are different from each other and aim to bring a surplus
>> value. As I said, Scalpel brings high homogeneity with Boost. It has
>> its own unique design and I also plan to endow it with round-trip
>> engineering capabilities.
>
>
> One area that scalpel could conceivably find a niche, depending on how
> you do it, would be in analyzing source code without seeing the full
> translation unit (as you might for syntax-coloring purposes). Â Since
> CLANG is really built to be a compiler, I don't think it can do that.
>
> Of course I realize you can't always get a correct analysis if you
> don't see the whole TU, but especially if you're willing to do
> nondeterministic parsing/backtracking, you could very easily do a
> really good job.

I do not think it can do that either, without seeing the whole
translation unit then you are going to see a *LOT* of undefined
symbols, no clue if they are a type, function, etc... etc....  It is
impossible to have any kind of decent syntax-coloring without that
(see the difference between the fully parsed and complete Visual
Assist VS add-in compared to emacs/vi/VS/etc...), and refactoring
becomes all but impossible.