GCC-XML

Development tools that work with programming languages benefit from their ability to understand the code with which they work at a level comparable to a compiler. C++ has become a popular and powerful language, but parsing it is a very challenging problem. This has discouraged the development of tools meant to work directly with the language.

There is one open-source C++ parser, the C++ front-end to GCC, which is currently able to deal with the language in its entirety. The purpose of the GCC-XML extension is to generate an XML description of a C++ program from GCC's internal representation. Since XML is easy to parse, other development tools will be able to work with C++ programs without the burden of a complicated C++ parser.

GCC-XML was developed by Brad King at Kitware to be used by