Inspecting generalized attributes with libclang

Question

I would like to parse generalized attributes of class member functions in the following example:

class Foo
{
public:
    void foo [[interesting]] ();
    void bar ();
};

Using the libclang C API, I would like to distinguish between foo and bar (and know that foo has the interesting attribute) in the source. Is this possible? I have a hard time finding examples or documentation that explains the concepts used in the API (I've found a reference, but that's kind of hard to use when the concepts are not explained).

Answer 1

While I was unable to find the generalized attributes in the AST (it seems they are dropped when or before constructing the AST, not after it), I did find a workaround.

There is an annotate clang attribute in the following form:

__attribute__((annotate("something")))

With a macro I could get a reasonable syntax and an annotation which is visible in the AST:

#define INTERESTING __attribute__((annotate("interesting")))

class Foo
{
public:
    INTERESTING void foo();
    void bar();
};

The attribute will be the child of the method node, with its display_name being the annotation string. A possible AST dump:

 <CursorKind.TRANSLATION_UNIT>
  "test.h"
{
  __builtin_va_list <CursorKind.TYPEDEF_DECL>
    "__builtin_va_list"
  type_info <CursorKind.CLASS_DECL>
    "type_info"
  Foo <CursorKind.CLASS_DECL>
    "Foo"
  {
     <CursorKind.CXX_ACCESS_SPEC_DECL>
      ""
    foo <CursorKind.CXX_METHOD>
      "foo()"
    {
       <CursorKind.ANNOTATE_ATTR>
        "interesting"
    }
    bar <CursorKind.CXX_METHOD>
      "bar()"
  }
}

It produces the same output with void foo INTERESTING (); too.