Exploring Clang's tooling features and extension options
The Clang project contains not just the clang executable. It also provides interfaces for developers to extend its tools, as well as to export its functionalities as libraries. In this section, we will give you an overview of all these options. Some of them will be covered in later chapters.
There are currently three kinds of tooling and extension options available in Clang: Clang plugins, libTooling, and Clang Tools. To explain their differences and provide more background knowledge when we talk about Clang extensions, we need to start from an important data type first: the clang::FrontendAction class.
The FrontendAction class
In the Learning Clang's subsystems and their roles section, we went through a variety of Clang's frontend components, such as the preprocessor and Sema, to name a few. Many of these important components are encapsulated by a single data type, called FrontendAction. A FrontendAction...
