Holy Macroni! A recipe for progressive language enhancement

By Brent Pappas

Despite its use for refactoring and static analysis tooling, Clang has a massive shortcoming: the Clang AST does not provide provenance information about which CPP macro expansions a given AST node is expanded from; nor does it lower macro expansions down to LLVM Intermediate Representation (IR) code. This makes the construction of macro-aware static analyses and transformations exceedingly difficult and an ongoing area of research.¹ Struggle no more, however, because this summer at Trail of Bits, …

analysis clang code cpp down information language llvm macro node provenance recipe refactoring representation static analysis tooling