1 <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN" 2 "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd"> 3 <html> 4 <head> 5 <META http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1" /> 6 <title>Clang - Get Involved</title> 7 <link type="text/css" rel="stylesheet" href="menu.css" /> 8 <link type="text/css" rel="stylesheet" href="content.css" /> 9 </head> 10 <body> 11 12 <!--#include virtual="menu.html.incl"--> 13 14 <div id="content"> 15 16 <h1>Open Clang Projects</h1> 17 18 <p>Here are a few tasks that are available for newcomers to work on, depending 19 on what your interests are. This list is provided to generate ideas, it is not 20 intended to be comprehensive. Please ask on cfe-dev for more specifics or to 21 verify that one of these isn't already completed. :)</p> 22 23 <ul> 24 <li><b>Undefined behavior checking</b>: CodeGen could 25 insert runtime checks for all sorts of different undefined behaviors, from 26 reading uninitialized variables, buffer overflows, and many other things. This 27 checking would be expensive, but the optimizers could eliminate many of the 28 checks in some cases, and it would be very interesting to test code in this mode 29 for certain crowds of people. Because the inserted code is coming from clang, 30 the "abort" message could be very detailed about exactly what went wrong.</li> 31 32 <li><b>Improve target support</b>: The current target interfaces are heavily 33 stubbed out and need to be implemented fully. See the FIXME's in TargetInfo. 34 Additionally, the actual target implementations (instances of TargetInfoImpl) 35 also need to be completed.</li> 36 37 <li><b>Implement an tool to generate code documentation</b>: Clang's 38 library-based design allows it to be used by a variety of tools that reason 39 about source code. One great application of Clang would be to build an 40 auto-documentation system like doxygen that generates code documentation from 41 source code. The advantage of using Clang for such a tool is that the tool would 42 use the same preprocessor/parser/ASTs as the compiler itself, giving it a very 43 rich understanding of the code.</li> 44 45 <li><b>Use clang libraries to implement better versions of existing tools</b>: 46 Clang is built as a set of libraries, which means that it is possible to 47 implement capabilities similar to other source language tools, improving them 48 in various ways. Three examples are <a 49 href="http://distcc.samba.org/">distcc</a>, the <a 50 href="http://delta.tigris.org/">delta testcase reduction tool</a>, and the 51 "indent" source reformatting tool. 52 distcc can be improved to scale better and be more efficient. Delta could be 53 faster and more efficient at reducing C-family programs if built on the clang 54 preprocessor, indent could do proper formatting for complex C++ features, and it 55 would be straight-forward to extend a clang-based implementation to handle 56 simple structural rules like those in <a 57 href="http://llvm.org/docs/CodingStandards.html#hl_earlyexit">the LLVM coding 58 standards</a>.</li> 59 60 <li><b>Use clang libraries to extend Ragel with a JIT</b>: <a 61 href="http://research.cs.queensu.ca/~thurston/ragel/">Ragel</a> is a state 62 machine compiler that lets you embed C code into state machines and generate 63 C code. It would be relatively easy to turn this into a JIT compiler using 64 LLVM.</li> 65 66 <li><b>Self-testing using clang</b>: There are several neat ways to 67 improve the quality of clang by self-testing. Some examples: 68 <ul> 69 <li>Improve the reliability of AST printing and serialization by 70 ensuring that the AST produced by clang on an input doesn't change 71 when it is reparsed or unserialized. 72 73 <li>Improve parser reliability and error generation by automatically 74 or randomly changing the input checking that clang doesn't crash and 75 that it doesn't generate excessive errors for small input 76 changes. Manipulating the input at both the text and token levels is 77 likely to produce interesting test cases. 78 </ul> 79 </li> 80 81 <li><b>Continue work on C++'0x support</b>: 82 C++'98 is feature complete, but there is still a lot of C++'0x featuers to 83 implement. Please see the <a href="cxx_status.html">C++ status report 84 page</a> to find out what is missing.</li> 85 </ul> 86 87 <p>If you hit a bug with clang, it is very useful for us if you reduce the code 88 that demonstrates the problem down to something small. There are many ways to 89 do this; ask on cfe-dev for advice.</p> 90 91 <ul> 92 <li><b>StringRef'ize APIs</b>: A thankless but incredibly useful project is 93 StringRef'izing (converting to use <tt>llvm::StringRef</tt> instead of <tt>const 94 char *</tt> or <tt>std::string</tt>) various clang interfaces. This generally 95 simplifies the code and makes it more efficient.</li> 96 97 <li><b>Universal Driver</b>: Clang is inherently a cross compiler. We would like 98 to define a new model for cross compilation which provides a great user 99 experience -- it should be easy to cross compile applications, install support 100 for new architectures, access different compilers and tools, and be consistent 101 across different platforms. See the <a href="UniversalDriver.html">Universal 102 Driver</a> web page for more information.</li> 103 104 <li><b>XML Representation of ASTs</b>: Clang maintains a rich Abstract Syntax Tree that describes the program. Clang could emit an XML document that describes the program, which others tools could consume rather than being tied directly to the Clang binary.The XML representation needs to meet several requirements: 105 <ul> 106 <li><i>General</i>, so that it's able to represent C/C++/Objective-C abstractly, and isn't tied to the specific internal ASTs that Clang uses.</li> 107 <li><i>Documented</i>, with appropriate Schema against which the output of Clang's XML formatter can be verified.</li> 108 <li><i>Stable</i> across Clang versions.</li> 109 </ul></li> 110 </ul> 111 112 </div> 113 </body> 114 </html> 115
