Open TravisCardwell opened 1 day ago
One idea is to change CName
to be a phantom type with a Namespace
parameter, like HsName
.
data Namespace =
NsOrdinary
| NsStructTag
| NsUnionTag
| NsEnumTag
newtype CName (ns :: Namespace) = CName { getCName :: Text }
...
This type does not include member namespaces, which are separate per structure/union. Discussing with @edsko yesterday, he suggested that we may want to model member namespaces as well, perhaps using a GADT.
C identifier namespace reference:
struct tag namespace: struct foo
it doesn't work in general. Counter example
struct foo {
struct { int x; int y } bar;
int z;
}
we will create CFooBar
which doesn't correspond to any type we could reference in C.
More generally, what you propose is essentially delaying name mangling.
Thanks for the example!
I think that we should track how parts of our generated ASTs are created, so in this case we could include information for CFooBar
that records that it is created for an anonymous structure. When generating tests, this information lets us know that we cannot create some tests for that type. For example, the PokePeekXSameSemanticsX
test can be implemented because it does not require C, while the HsSizeOfXEqCSizeOfX
cannot be implemented because there is no way to reference the anonymous structure in C.
I do not mean to suggest that name mangling should be delayed. A Struct
should continue to contain structName :: HsName NsTypeConstr
. The suggestion is to add information about how/why the particular Struct
is created.
Regarding documentation, we could generate documentation like the following:
This type corresponds to the anonymous @struct@ defined for field @bar@ of
@struct foo@. Source: @foobar.h@ line 121
The suggestion is to add information about how/why the particular
Struct
is created.Regarding documentation, we could generate documentation like the following:
This type corresponds to the anonymous @struct@ defined for field @bar@ of @struct foo@. Source: @foobar.h@ line 121
which is essentially preserving exactly the information (to be) passed to the name mangling machinery. (And source location, but that is purely informative bit).
Indeed. Perhaps another way to put it is that name mangling is not invertible.
When generating tests, name CFooBar
does not provide enough information for us to determine which tests need to be created for it. Additional information is required. If such information is included in the AST, it can be used to make the necessary decisions. With the current ASTs, generating tests for CFooBar
requires that we process the C Header
(again) to determine how/why CFooBar
is created.
Documentation like the above example could help users understand/confirm which Haskell maps to which C. When a user sees name CFooBar
, they may want to confirm that it is for an anonymous struct
and not a C type named foo_bar
. I imagine that it is not necessary in many cases, but it would likely be appreciated when the C API uses similar names that may be confusing, especially after translation to Haskell.
I think that the easiest solution to go forward is to add a field with clang_getTypeSpelling
result. We only have to filter out invalid spellings (like struct (unnamed struct at ex.h:2:2)
), but AFAICT these are easy to spot (they end with invalid character )
).
CXString clang_getTypeSpelling (CXType CT) Pretty-print the underlying type using the rules of the language of the translation unit from which it came.
That string is not CName
, but I don't think we need to parse it in any way, simply use it as is.
We would like to track how various parts of our generated ASTs are created, referencing the C source.
One motivation for this is test generation (#22), which requires generating both C and Haskell code for testing. Generating the C test code from a C
Header
is not a good option because we would need to reimplement a lot of the logic for translating from C to Haskell. If the Haskell AST includes C source information, we could traverse the Haskell AST and determine exactly what test functions are required, perhaps referencing the CHeader
to get C details.For example, for a given
data
declaration (calledStruct
inHs
andRecord
inSHs
), it is useful to know the name of the corresponding C type, including the C namespace. When generating C code, the namespace determines how an identifier is written.foo
struct
tag namespace:struct foo
union
tag namespace:union foo
enum
namespace:enum foo
C source information can also be used to improve the generated Haddock documentation (#26). For example, we could output corresponding C names to help users understand/confirm which Haskell maps to which C.
We should include source locations, which may optionally be output in
LINE
pragmas (#74). We could even consider including source location information in generated Haddock documentation.Related to #23 (which is for the high-level API)