AST from C code

c abstract-syntax-tree
Sachin Khot picture Sachin Khot · Oct 27, 2008 · Viewed 23.8k times · Source

I want to perform some transformations on C source code. I need a tool on linux that generates a complete AST from the source code so that I can apply my transformations on this AST and then convert it back to the C source code. I tried ELSA but it is not getting compiled. (I am using Ubuntu 8.4). Can anyone suggest a better tool/application?

Answer

Louis Gerbarg picture Louis Gerbarg · Oct 30, 2008

I would recommend clang. It has a fairly complete C implementation with most gcc extensions, and the code is very understandable. Their C++ implementation is incomplete, but if you only care about generating ASTs from C code that should be fine. Depending on what you want to do you can either use clang as a library and work with the ASTs directly, or have clang dump them out to console.

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