Open Clang Projects

Here are a few tasks that are available for newcomers to work on, depending on what your interests are. This list is provided to generate ideas, it is not intended to be comprehensive. Please ask on cfe-dev for more specifics or to verify that one of these isn't already completed. :)

• Compile your favorite C/ObjC project with Clang: Clang's type-checking and code generation is very close to complete (but not bug free!) for C and Objective-C. We appreciate all reports of code that is rejected or miscompiled by the front-end. If you notice invalid code that is not rejected, or poor diagnostics when code is rejected, that is also very important to us. For make-based projects, the clang driver works as a drop-in replacement for GCC.
• Undefined behavior checking: CodeGen could insert runtime checks for all sorts of different undefined behaviors, from reading uninitialized variables, buffer overflows, and many other things. This checking would be expensive, but the optimizers could eliminate many of the checks in some cases, and it would be very interesting to test code in this mode for certain crowds of people. Because the inserted code is coming from clang, the "abort" message could be very detailed about exactly what went wrong.
• Improve target support: The current target interfaces are heavily stubbed out and need to be implemented fully. See the FIXME's in TargetInfo. Additionally, the actual target implementations (instances of TargetInfoImpl) also need to be completed.
• Implement an tool to generate code documentation: Clang's library-based design allows it to be used by a variety of tools that reason about source code. One great application of Clang would be to build an auto-documentation system like doxygen that generates code documentation from source code. The advantage of using Clang for such a tool is that the tool would use the same preprocessor/parser/ASTs as the compiler itself, giving it a very rich understanding of the code.
• Use clang libraries to implement better versions of existing tools: Clang is built as a set of libraries, which means that it is possible to implement capabilities similar to other source language tools, improving them in various ways. Two examples are distcc and the delta testcase reduction tool. The former can be improved to scale better and be more efficient. The latter could also be faster and more efficient at reducing C-family programs if built on the clang preprocessor.
• Use clang libraries to extend Ragel with a JIT: Ragel is a state machine compiler that lets you embed C code into state machines and generate C code. It would be relatively easy to turn this into a JIT compiler using LLVM.
• Self-testing using clang: There are several neat ways to improve the quality of clang by self-testing. Some examples:
  • Improve the reliability of AST printing and serialization by ensuring that the AST produced by clang on an input doesn't change when it is reparsed or unserialized.
  • Improve parser reliability and error generation by automatically or randomly changing the input checking that clang doesn't crash and that it doesn't generate excessive errors for small input changes. Manipulating the input at both the text and token levels is likely to produce interesting test cases.
• Continue work on C++ support: Implementing all of C++ is a very big job, but there are lots of little pieces that can be picked off and implemented. Here are some small- to mid-sized C++ implementation projects:
  • Fix bugs: there are a number of XFAIL'd test cases in Clang's repository (particularly in the CXX subdirectory). Pick a test case and fix Clang to make it work!
  • Write tests: the CXX test subdirectory in Clang's repository has placeholders for tests of every paragraph in the C++ standard. Pick a paragraph, write a few tests, and see if they work! Even if they don't we'd still like the new tests (with XFAIL'd) so that we know what to fix.
  • Parsing and semantic analysis for using declarations in classes
  • Inherited conversion functions
  • Improved diagnostics for overloading failures and ambiguities
  • Improved template error messages, e.g., with more informative backtraces
  Also, see the C++ status report page to find out what is missing and what is already at least partially supported.

If you hit a bug with clang, it is very useful for us if you reduce the code that demonstrates the problem down to something small. There are many ways to do this; ask on cfe-dev for advice.

StringRef'ize APIs: A thankless but incredibly useful project is StringRef'izing (converting to use llvm::StringRef instead of const char * or std::string) various clang interfaces. This generally simplifies the code and makes it more efficient.

Universal Driver: Clang is inherently a cross compiler. We would like to define a new model for cross compilation which provides a great user experience -- it should be easy to cross compile applications, install support for new architectures, access different compilers and tools, and be consistent across different platforms. See the Universal Driver web page for more information.