On Wed, Apr 22, 2020 at 11:37:23AM +0200, Andrea Bolognani wrote: > On Wed, 2020-04-22 at 09:48 +0100, Daniel P. Berrangé wrote: > > On Wed, Apr 22, 2020 at 01:51:10PM +0800, Shi Lei wrote: > > > As you suggested, parsing C-structs plus some magic comments may be a good starting point. > > > But parsing C is much more difficult than parsing xml or json. I think this job should base on > > > some present tools or other basis. We can first refer to Clang or other light compiler front-end. > > > Maybe we can utilize some output of the middle stage of these compilers. > > > > FWIW, we already have a tool in libvirt that parsers C header files. The > > scripts/apibuild.py file extracts info about our enums, structs, APIs and > > uses it to build the public API documentation. > > > > I wonder if we can refactor that tool to extract the code for parsing into > > a module, so that we can more reasily re-use it for both the API docs and > > for a new XML generator > > Or we could replace that C parsing code with something based on > libclang. I think that's a double edged sword. While it gives you the full coverage of the C language, you then have to deal with the full range of the C language. I think the simplified parser we have for the docs build will be easier to work with by being more constrained in what it tries to support. > Either way, if this ever becomes usable I think it should not live > in the libvirt repository but be a standalone tool instead, as I can > see many projects potentially benefiting from it. Yes, but we can worry about that at a later date IMHO. > Which begs the question: are we absolutely certain something like > this doesn't exist already? We should make sure that's really the > case before we invest time on it... I've not found anything equivalent to Golang's XML parser for C Regards, Daniel -- |: https://berrange.com -o- https://www.flickr.com/photos/dberrange :| |: https://libvirt.org -o- https://fstop138.berrange.com :| |: https://entangle-photo.org -o- https://www.instagram.com/dberrange :|
