Re: [cedet-semantic] Best approach for adding objective-c support ?

[Eric M. L. <er...@si...>]

Hi,

Semantic defines a basic "tag" structure.  Tags can be generated in any 
old way you can think of, including wisent parsers, exuberent ctag 
parsers, Emacs lisp introspection, and a few others.  Choosing the right 
path is a matter of what your goals are.

The parser to use depends on which types of features you want to use. 
The best solution would be to write a wisent parser, starting with the 
wisent info manual.  There are several parsers to refer to while solving 
this problem.  Use wisent to get the maximum number of features 
supported via CEDET.

clang might also work as a parsing solution.  David Engster has recently 
started integrating clang, but not yet as a tagging tool.  If it were 
adapted to generate tags for C++, I'd assume it would also solve the 
objective C parsing problem.  The dilemma is that you need to save a 
file to get good tag information.

Since you discuss iOS projects, you might also want to adapt EDE to iOS 
projects.  There is a android branch in bzr with support for android 
projects in EDE that might form an example of doing the same for iOS. 
(I don't have any idea what those projects are like, but perhaps it's 
similar.)

EDE is useful for helping Semantic find include files for the smart 
completion features.  It also allows project-y keybindings for 
compilation, debugging, etc.

If you find yourself successful in creating such tools and would like to 
contribute them to CEDET, they can either go into the contrib area, or 
you will need to get a release from your employer for contributions to 
Emacs.  You can write to cop...@fs... for instructions on how 
to do that.

Good Luck, and feel free to query this list if you get stuck.

Thanks!
Eric

On 04/29/2011 06:53 AM, Julien Fantin wrote:
> Hi list,
>
> TL;DR
>
> I have the motivation but lack the experience to attack this task, so
> I'm looking for some help getting the very first steps right.
>
> More specifically :
>
> - Which approach to investigate i.e. wether to look into wisent, clang
>    or both.
>
> - Some references to Info nodes, posts and/or source files to look into
>    for guidelines and examples.
>
> - Maybe some recommendations for litterature on the matter, in case I
>    look way out of my depth here...
>
>
> Longer version:
>
> I've been using emacs for a couple of years, and I've been properly
> learning emacs-lisp for half that. I've used emacs extensively only for
> programming in dynamic languages such as js, ruby or some lisps, and
> thus never took the time to get familiar with cedet. This is the noob
> part.
>
> I've just gotten a job as an iOS developper, but I can't say I'm looking
> forward to editing code in Xcode all day long for the foreseeable
> future. So I want to add some support for this platform in Emacs. This
> is the motivation part.
>
> It seems that the first step would be to add support for objective-c in
> semantic, but despite reading the addlang and addtool pages on the
> website, I feel a little overwhelmed. I do not have any experience
> writing a grammar, so I'm confused regarding which method to use, and
> the recent work on integrating clang opened-up even more possibilities
> that confuse me.
>
> Regards,
> Julien.
>
>
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