View source for DXR Rewrite

= DXR Rewrite  =

DXR Rewrite is a project with the goal of reviving the old [http://vocamus.net/dave/?p=557 DXR] tool and build it on top of more modern infrastructure.

== Goals ==

*Support for C++, IDL, C, JavaScript, and Objective-C, in that order<br> 
*Providing type information, call graphs, etc. across languages
*Being easy to deploy (developers should be able to build and run it with minimal effort on their own machine)

== Non-Goals ==

*Text indexing/searching

== Example Use Case ==

A developer interested in running DXR&nbsp;locally should be able to add something like this to their mozconfig:
<pre>CC=/path/to/dxr-indexer
CXX=/path/to/dxr-indexer++
LD=/path/to/dxr-linker
</pre>
And proceed with a normal build, and at the end, run the web server locally and point it to the generated database.

== Phases ==

=== C++ ===

#Build a compiler replacement tool on top of Clang's [http://clang.llvm.org/docs/libIndex.html libindex].&nbsp; (See the slides and video on the talk labeled "libclang: Thinking Beyond the Compiler" [http://llvm.org/devmtg/2010-11/ here] for an introduction)
#Make it emit .o files containing type information required for DXR.
#Create a linker replacement tool which extracts the type information from the "compiled" files and generates the full database in DXR's format.

=== IDL ===

#Build an IDL&nbsp;compiler replacement tool (probably by extending the existing parser) to extract type information for interfaces.
#Figure out how to map those information from the information generated from C++&nbsp;(we need to retarget types defined in the IDL-generated headers to their IDL&nbsp;original definition).
#Integrate that into the C++-only DXR from phase 1.

=== C ===

#The C&nbsp;step might be quite simple, and most of the code from phase 1 can probably be used here directly.
#Figure out if there are any C-specific peculiarities we need to handle.
#Integrate the C indexer into the C++/IDL&nbsp;DXR.

=== JS ===

#TBD (should be discussed with the JS&nbsp;team).

=== Objective C ===

#libindex supports Objective C too, but the API&nbsp;is kind of different.&nbsp; We need to extend the indexer to support Objective C specific stuff.

== UI ==

DXR's UI, while not perfect, is really good, so we're not very focused on redoing the UI.  We will fix it if it needs fixing (it does have a fair number of rough edges), but at this point, rewriting the UI is out of scope.