Stories from the land of Rob

I’ve been gradually pushing on in my free time on gobject-introspection, so I can make the dbus-glib bindings decent. A couple of months ago back I started hacking up a code scanner to generate the introspection xml,using code from gtk-doc, but using perl regexps to parse C just made me feel dirty…

Johan Dahlin pointed me at Sparse, a front-end parser for c developed by some of the kernel guys. The only problem is that it doesn’t have language bindings (or even, seemingly, a stable abi). So I’ve just submitted a patch to sparse that adds an executable ‘c2xml‘. c2xml will dump the parse tree of the input file as a simple xml structure, suitable for manipulation by some python or suchlike. That could then be used to, say, generate c api descriptions, documentation and language bindings or make code navigation or refactoring tools.

I like it!