Re: MPS codegen

[Helmut Eller]

On Fri, Jun 14 2024, Gerd Möllmann wrote:

>> At the time I tried to hack something to generate the code you wanted
>> (well my interpretation as I never got the minimal example I asked for)
>> but when Eli suggested treesitter I gave-up as I thought was a good (and
>> better) suggestion.  
>
> The Lisp code Helmut posted could serve as an example, I think. The task
> would be to replace the manual object layout descriptions with ones
> generated from C code. Or something like that.

A nice approach would be to use C23 attribute syntax to add annotations
in the existing C structs.  Then extract the layout descriptions from
those annotations.  But how the actual annotations should look like is
not clear.  E.g. how to express the "switch fields" that I used in the
layout description.  There are lots of other details like this that
don't have obvious solutions.

> BTW, @Helmut: do you plan to work on this idea? I'm asking because I'm
> in sort of a buf-fixing-only mode right now, i.e. I'm trying to make it
> work well enough that I can use it and get an impression how it does
> while doing something completely different from MPS. (Alas, I had to fix
> one or there things to make that possible.) So, I'll probably not
> tackle your dumper idea in the near future...

I planned to give it a try, but not until somebody™ updates the branch
on savannah.  Otherwise patches to pdumper.c don't apply cleanly.