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| <h1>Open Clang Projects</h1> |
| |
| <p>Here are a few tasks that are available for newcomers to work on, depending |
| on what your interests are. This list is provided to generate ideas, it is not |
| intended to be comprehensive. Please ask on cfe-dev for more specifics or to |
| verify that one of these isn't already completed. :)</p> |
| |
| <ul> |
| <li><b>Compile your favorite C/ObjC project with Clang</b>: |
| Clang's type-checking and code generation is very close to complete (but not bug free!) for C and Objective-C. We appreciate all reports of code that is |
| rejected or miscompiled by the front-end. If you notice invalid code that is not rejected, or poor diagnostics when code is rejected, that is also very important to us. For make-based projects, |
| the <a href="get_started.html#driver"><code>clang</code></a> driver works as a drop-in replacement for GCC.</li> |
| |
| <li><b>Undefined behavior checking</b>: CodeGen could |
| insert runtime checks for all sorts of different undefined behaviors, from |
| reading uninitialized variables, buffer overflows, and many other things. This |
| checking would be expensive, but the optimizers could eliminate many of the |
| checks in some cases, and it would be very interesting to test code in this mode |
| for certain crowds of people. Because the inserted code is coming from clang, |
| the "abort" message could be very detailed about exactly what went wrong.</li> |
| |
| <li><b>Improve target support</b>: The current target interfaces are heavily |
| stubbed out and need to be implemented fully. See the FIXME's in TargetInfo. |
| Additionally, the actual target implementations (instances of TargetInfoImpl) |
| also need to be completed.</li> |
| |
| <li><b>Implement an tool to generate code documentation</b>: Clang's |
| library-based design allows it to be used by a variety of tools that reason |
| about source code. One great application of Clang would be to build an |
| auto-documentation system like doxygen that generates code documentation from |
| source code. The advantage of using Clang for such a tool is that the tool would |
| use the same preprocessor/parser/ASTs as the compiler itself, giving it a very |
| rich understanding of the code.</li> |
| |
| <li><b>Use clang libraries to implement better versions of existing tools</b>: |
| Clang is built as a set of libraries, which means that it is possible to |
| implement capabilities similar to other source language tools, improving them |
| in various ways. Two examples are <a href="http://distcc.samba.org/">distcc</a> |
| and the <a href="http://delta.tigris.org/">delta testcase reduction tool</a>. |
| The former can be improved to scale better and be more efficient. The latter |
| could also be faster and more efficient at reducing C-family programs if built |
| on the clang preprocessor.</li> |
| |
| <li><b>Use clang libraries to extend Ragel with a JIT</b>: <a |
| href="http://research.cs.queensu.ca/~thurston/ragel/">Ragel</a> is a state |
| machine compiler that lets you embed C code into state machines and generate |
| C code. It would be relatively easy to turn this into a JIT compiler using |
| LLVM.</li> |
| |
| <li><b>Self-testing using clang</b>: There are several neat ways to |
| improve the quality of clang by self-testing. Some examples: |
| <ul> |
| <li>Improve the reliability of AST printing and serialization by |
| ensuring that the AST produced by clang on an input doesn't change |
| when it is reparsed or unserialized. |
| |
| <li>Improve parser reliability and error generation by automatically |
| or randomly changing the input checking that clang doesn't crash and |
| that it doesn't generate excessive errors for small input |
| changes. Manipulating the input at both the text and token levels is |
| likely to produce interesting test cases. |
| </ul> |
| </li> |
| |
| <li><b>Continue work on C++ support</b>: Implementing all of C++ is a very big |
| job, but there are lots of little pieces that can be picked off and implemented. Here are some small- to mid-sized C++ implementation projects: |
| <ul> |
| <li>Fix bugs: there are a number of XFAIL'd test cases in Clang's repository (particularly in the CXX subdirectory). Pick a test case and fix Clang to make it work!</li> |
| <li>Write tests: the CXX test subdirectory in Clang's repository has placeholders for tests of every paragraph in the C++ standard. Pick a paragraph, write a few tests, and see if they work! Even if they don't we'd still like the new tests (with XFAIL'd) so that we know what to fix.</li> |
| <li>Parsing and semantic analysis for using declarations in classes</li> |
| <li>Inherited conversion functions</li> |
| <li>Improved diagnostics for overloading failures and ambiguities</li> |
| <li>Improved template error messages, e.g., with more informative backtraces</li> |
| </ul> |
| |
| Also, see the <a href="cxx_status.html">C++ status report page</a> to |
| find out what is missing and what is already at least partially |
| supported.</li> |
| </ul> |
| |
| <p>If you hit a bug with clang, it is very useful for us if you reduce the code |
| that demonstrates the problem down to something small. There are many ways to |
| do this; ask on cfe-dev for advice.</p> |
| |
| <li><b>StringRef'ize APIs</b>: A thankless but incredibly useful project is |
| StringRef'izing (converting to use <tt>llvm::StringRef</tt> instead of <tt>const |
| char *</tt> or <tt>std::string</tt>) various clang interfaces. This generally |
| simplifies the code and makes it more efficient.</li> |
| |
| <li><b>Universal Driver</b>: Clang is inherently a cross compiler. We would like |
| to define a new model for cross compilation which provides a great user |
| experience -- it should be easy to cross compile applications, install support |
| for new architectures, access different compilers and tools, and be consistent |
| across different platforms. See the <a href="UniversalDriver.html">Universal |
| Driver</a> web page for more information.</li> |
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