[jchw]

I hope more refactoring tools come into existence in the future. Right now, writing transforms similar to this complexity using Clang would require a fairly large amount of boilerplate code, implementing at least some AST matching code and wrapping it into a frontend action. While having this for Go is good, I hope it grows and inspires others to do similar things in other languages, the same way gofmt once did.

[azernik]

Since you're talking about Clang, I assume you're coding in C? In that case, Coccinelle [https://coccinelle.gitlabpages.inria.fr/website/sp.html] may serve your purposes, and has a long history of use in the Linux kernel to modify shared APIs.

[jchw]

In case of Clang (and more specifically libClang,) I am usually using it to do source-to-source translations on C++ code. In those cases, sometimes I need some fairly advanced knowledge, such as the type of an expression, to match on or perform logic on. However, this still looks quite interesting for some use cases (and I am interested in such tools.)

[azernik]

Ooooh ouch, yeah C++ is generally rough on static analysis tools.

[anitil]

> AST matching code and wrapping it into a frontend action.

I'm working on a an AST visualization tool and accidentally stumbled in to this rabbit hole. Send help!