Assembling AST manually and using CppWriter

[salehjg]

Hi there,
Hope you are having a good day.

I am working on a project that needs to be able to generate mutable AST and of course, prettyprint it to get an output c/c++ code. Last night I came across CppParser and before anything else, thank you for sharing this amazing project. I love the fact that it does not depend on any huge library such as Clang.

I noticed CppWriter is a class to pretty-print AST to c/c++ code which is exactly what I needed.
Now I have to write a builder class to build AST from scratch, meaning that the parser won't be the one putting AST together, but the user will create AST using some limited/simplified builder API.

Basically, my project tries to convert huge computational graphs (which are mixed with symbolic expressions) to AST and from there to c/c++ code.

The core idea is to modify AST on various occasions and finally emit the c/c++ code using CppWriter.

I wrote this to ask for your advice on how to approach this. Given your in-depth insight into the data structures of the AST, do you think it is a good idea to approach the problem this way (i.e. writing an AST builder class)?

Is there any other well-established way to approach this that I am missing? (like some opensource projects or sth)

I would love to have your input on this.
Kind regards,
Saleh

[satya-das]

Builder class maybe a possible solution but if you need to mutate the AST then you will need to have methods to modify the AST objects.
You have have come across https://github.com/standardese/cppast project, if not then I will suggest to take a look.