AST

Clang is everywhere; It is the core of my favorite Vim plugin YouCompleteMe, it recently got supported by Microsoft Visual Studio, it is mentioned in numerous episodes of CppCast and it powers the excellent clang formatter. Naturally, I wanted to get a better understanding of how the clang front end works under the hood. Clang Front End & AST Clang is a C language family front end for LLVM. In compiler design, a front end takes care of the analysis part, which means breaking up the source code into pieces according to a grammatical structure. The result is an intermediate representation which is transformed in a target program by the back end, called synthesis. Optionally, there is an intermediate step between the front- and back end for optimization. ...