Re: [boost] Status of FSM viewer

Subject: Re: [boost] Status of FSM viewer
From: Michal Sojka (sojkam1_at_[hidden])
Date: 2010-09-09 03:34:07

Hi Andreas,

thanks for the prompt answers. See my comments bellow.

On Thu, 09 Sep 2010, Andreas Huber wrote:
> > we are looking for a solution to visualize FSMs in our robotic
> > applications. Before starting the development of our own tool I'd
> > like to ask whether there exists something able to visualize
> > Boost.Statecharts FSMs.
> 
> No, as far as I know.
> 
> > I was only able to find the
> > following GSOC
> > project:
> [snip links]
> > but in my quick tests it produced only empty figures. I
> > believe that
> > after some debugging I could make it work.
> 
> Personally I wouldn't bother. IIRC, the project depends on GCC_XML,
> the latest release of which is still 0.6, from 2004. There is activity
> in source control but I'm not sure it has anything to do with the
> tool.
> 
> > My question is whether the development of this tool continues or
> > whether there are some other tools. In case of negative answers, do
> > you have any suggestions for the development of the new tool?
> > Currently, we consider the development of a GCC plugin which will
> > generate dot (graphviz) source.
> 
> I don't know anything about GCC plugins, but I guess that is certainly
> an option. Personally, I'd also check out clang, which presumably can
> provide you with a much more C++-like representation of the parsed
> source code.

I had also thought about using clang but I was not able to compile even
simple FSMs with it. I produced a lot of strange errors. I guess that
clang's C++ support is not as mature as of GCC. Do you have more
positive experience with clang++?

> P.S. If you make your tool public, I'd love to be informed when you
> have a first version to check out. Thanks!

A student of mine will work on this in his bachelor thesis so the tool
will definitely be public. If we have something that works, I'll let you
know.

Cheers,
-Michal