Abstract
Developers today expect development tools such as editors to offer features based on a semantic-level understanding of their code.
This presentation explores various approaches editors take to provide semantic features, with a focus on the C++ programming language.
Eclipse’s C/C++ Development Tools (CDT) are a classical example of an editor rolling its own semantic understanding of C++. It has served the C++ developer community well, but more recently has lagged behind in support for newer C++ language features.
In recent years, the Language Server Protocol has emerged as a promising technology that decouples components providing semantic language understanding (language servers) from the editors that make use of them (language clients). The C++ community has converged on Clangd as the leading open-source C++ language server implementation.
Providing performant and accurate editor tooling for C++ is particularly challenging, due to the language’s unique features, such as its textual header inclusion model, conditional branches in the preprocessor, and its approach to parameterized code (templates). Clangd makes a number of architectural innovations to tackle these challenges. The C++ community has additional improvements to look forward to in the editor tooling space, both from further enhancements to Clangd’s implementation, as well as benefits to be reaped from new C++ language features such as Modules and Concepts.
Biography
Botond Ballo is a software engineer passionate about C++ and developer tooling.
Botond works for Mozilla on the Firefox web browser’s rendering engine, a large open-source C++ codebase which more recently has also gained components written in Rust. Botond also contracts with Ericsson to work on the Clangd C++ language server, a server-side implementation of the Language Server Protocol which is promising to serve as the basis for the next generation of C++ editor tooling. Botond has previously contributed to the Eclipse C/C++ Developer Tools for several years and is working to apply the insights gained about C++ editor tooling during that process, to his current efforts to improve Clangd. Botond contributes to the Eclipse and LLVM communities under the pseudonym Nathan Ridge.
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