C++Now 2014

Refactoring tools for C++ have lagged behind those available in other languages. We've all heard the excuses about how C++ is too hard to parse and too hard to reason about. Well, get ready to have your socks blown off by the tooling infrastructure provided with clang. It makes writing refactoring tools simple and easy.

In this talk, I will incrementally develop a refactoring tool with clang that transforms a "(void)" function argument list to an empty argument list: "()".  This will give you a concrete example of how to apply the tooling library from clang: exploring the parsed abstract syntax tree (AST), writing code that matches elements of the AST, and operating on the matched nodes to create source code transformations that are applied by the tooling library.

If time is available, we'll look at some other examples of refactoring tools and discuss how they operate.