I've been thinking about how to do this effectively and cleanly for a while now, and I wonder if the right path isn't to use clang to parse the C or C++ code and then generate interfaces from the LLVM IR. As far as I know, all the metadata you need is there, so it might prove simpler than parsing things on your own.
We've done this. A modified clang-interpreter spits out some json. Python scripts consume the it and generate reflection data, script bindings etc.
We're very happy with the results. It's a little bit slower than hand parsing the headers, but the robustness more than compensates for it. We set up a unity build (just for the headers) to make up the speed difference.
Comments
I've been thinking about how to do this effectively and cleanly for a while now, and I wonder if the right path isn't to use clang to parse the C or C++ code and then generate interfaces from the LLVM IR. As far as I know, all the metadata you need is there, so it might prove simpler than parsing things on your own.
We've done this. A modified clang-interpreter spits out some json. Python scripts consume the it and generate reflection data, script bindings etc.
We're very happy with the results. It's a little bit slower than hand parsing the headers, but the robustness more than compensates for it. We set up a unity build (just for the headers) to make up the speed difference.
Also have a look at doxygen. It can emit xml describing the code, rather than documentation.