On Thu, Jul 24, 2014 at 11:57 AM, Francois Berenger <francois.berenger.work...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Thu, Jul 24, 2014 at 4:29 PM, Diego Novillo <dnovi...@google.com> wrote: >> On Thu, Jul 24, 2014 at 7:17 AM, Francois Berenger >> <francois.berenger.work...@gmail.com> wrote: >> >>> Complete in the sense that, by parsing back this text file >>> with an external program it would be possible to reconstruct the original >>> AST >>> that gcc was working on (and dumped out). >> >> It isn't. These dumps are meant to be debugging aids. It is not >> possible to reconstruct the original program out of them. > > Would it be possible to make these dumps complete? > Let's say for the C frontend of gcc.
That's likely to be a significant effort. The tree representation is not really streamable. The front end keeps a lot of state in-memory that is not attached to the tree themselves. There was some preliminary effort to achieve this with the pre-parsed headers project (a precursor to C++ modules). We've since abandoned the effort, but you can still get at the code and documentation: https://gcc.gnu.org/wiki/pph Diego.
