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  16 <h1>Open Clang Projects</h1>
  17
  18 <p>Here are a few tasks that are available for newcomers to work on, depending
  19 on what your interests are.  This list is provided to generate ideas, it is not
  20 intended to be comprehensive.  Please ask on cfe-dev for more specifics or to
  21 verify that one of these isn't already completed. :)</p>
  22
  23 <ul>
  24 <li><b>Undefined behavior checking</b>: CodeGen could
  25 insert runtime checks for all sorts of different undefined behaviors, from
  26 reading uninitialized variables, buffer overflows, and many other things.  This
  27 checking would be expensive, but the optimizers could eliminate many of the
  28 checks in some cases, and it would be very interesting to test code in this mode
  29 for certain crowds of people.  Because the inserted code is coming from clang,
  30 the "abort" message could be very detailed about exactly what went wrong.</li>
  31
  32 <li><b>Improve target support</b>: The current target interfaces are heavily
  33 stubbed out and need to be implemented fully.  See the FIXME's in TargetInfo.
  34 Additionally, the actual target implementations (instances of TargetInfoImpl)
  35 also need to be completed.</li>
  36
  37 <li><b>Implement an tool to generate code documentation</b>: Clang's
  38 library-based design allows it to be used by a variety of tools that reason
  39 about source code. One great application of Clang would be to build an
  40 auto-documentation system like doxygen that generates code documentation from
  41 source code. The advantage of using Clang for such a tool is that the tool would
  42 use the same preprocessor/parser/ASTs as the compiler itself, giving it a very
  43 rich understanding of the code.</li>
  44
  45 <li><b>Use clang libraries to implement better versions of existing tools</b>:
  46 Clang is built as a set of libraries, which means that it is possible to
  47 implement capabilities similar to other source language tools, improving them
  48 in various ways.  Three examples are <a
  49 href="http://distcc.samba.org/">distcc</a>, the <a
  50 href="http://delta.tigris.org/">delta testcase reduction tool</a>, and the
  51 "indent" source reformatting tool.
  52 distcc can be improved to scale better and be more efficient.  Delta could be
  53 faster and more efficient at reducing C-family programs if built on the clang
  54 preprocessor, indent could do proper formatting for complex C++ features, and it
  55 would be straight-forward to extend a clang-based implementation to handle
  56 simple structural rules like those in <a
  57 href="http://llvm.org/docs/CodingStandards.html#hl_earlyexit">the LLVM coding
  58 standards</a>.</li>
  59
  60 <li><b>Use clang libraries to extend Ragel with a JIT</b>: <a
  61 href="http://research.cs.queensu.ca/~thurston/ragel/">Ragel</a> is a state
  62 machine compiler that lets you embed C code into state machines and generate
  63 C code.  It would be relatively easy to turn this into a JIT compiler using
  64 LLVM.</li>
  65
  66 <li><b>Self-testing using clang</b>: There are several neat ways to
  67 improve the quality of clang by self-testing. Some examples:
  68 <ul>
  69   <li>Improve the reliability of AST printing and serialization by
  70   ensuring that the AST produced by clang on an input doesn't change
  71   when it is reparsed or unserialized.
  72
  73   <li>Improve parser reliability and error generation by automatically
  74   or randomly changing the input checking that clang doesn't crash and
  75   that it doesn't generate excessive errors for small input
  76   changes. Manipulating the input at both the text and token levels is
  77   likely to produce interesting test cases.
  78 </ul>
  79 </li>
  80
  81 <li><b>Continue work on C++'0x support</b>:
  82   C++'98 is feature complete, but there is still a lot of C++'0x featuers to
  83   implement.  Please see the <a href="cxx_status.html">C++ status report
  84   page</a> to find out what is missing.</li>
  85 </ul>
  86
  87 <p>If you hit a bug with clang, it is very useful for us if you reduce the code
  88 that demonstrates the problem down to something small.  There are many ways to
  89 do this; ask on cfe-dev for advice.</p>
  90
  91 <ul>
  92 <li><b>StringRef'ize APIs</b>: A thankless but incredibly useful project is
  93 StringRef'izing (converting to use <tt>llvm::StringRef</tt> instead of <tt>const
  94 char *</tt> or <tt>std::string</tt>) various clang interfaces. This generally
  95 simplifies the code and makes it more efficient.</li>
  96
  97 <li><b>Universal Driver</b>: Clang is inherently a cross compiler. We would like
  98 to define a new model for cross compilation which provides a great user
  99 experience -- it should be easy to cross compile applications, install support
 100 for new architectures, access different compilers and tools, and be consistent
 101 across different platforms. See the <a href="UniversalDriver.html">Universal
 102 Driver</a> web page for more information.</li>
 103 </ul>
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