Learning Clang's subsystems and their roles

In this section, we will give you an overview of Clang's structures and organizations. We will briefly introduce some of the important components or subsystems, before using dedicated sections or chapters to expand them further in later parts of this book. We hope this will give you some idea of Clang's internals and how they will benefit your development.

First, let's look at the big picture. The following diagram shows the high-level structure of Clang:

Figure 5.1 – High-level structure of Clang

As explained in the legend, rectangles with rounded corners represent subsystems that might consist of multiple components with similar functionalities. For example, the frontend can be further dissected into components such as the preprocessor, parser, and code generation logic, to name a few. In addition, there are intermediate results, depicted as ovals in the preceding diagram. We are especially...