2018 LLVM Developers' Meeting

This talk will cover the lessons we learned from the process of writing tools with Clang's LibTooling. We will also introduce clangmetatool, the open source framework we use (and developed) to reuse code when writing Clang tools.

When we first started writing Clang tools, we realized that there is a lot of lifecycle management that we had to repeat. In some cases, people advocate for the usage of global variables to manage the lifecycle of that data, but this actually makes code reuse across tools even harder.

We also learned that, when writing a tool, it is beneficial if the code is split into two phases -- a data collection phase and, later, a post-processing phase which actually performs the bulk of the logic of the tool.

More details at https://bloomberg.github.io/clangmetatool/