2019 LLVM Developers’ Meeting: P. Lotfi “Clang Interface Stubs: Syntax Directed Stub Library Gen...”

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Clang Interface Stubs: Syntax Directed Stub Library Generation. - Puyan Lotfi

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Stub libraries, like import libraries on Windows and TAPI on Darwin, are useful for reducing link time and for constraining the API surface of an SDK. Stub libraries are limited to the API surface the library author intends to expose to users and do not contain runtime code. We believe that source driven API annotation is the best way to encourage library writers to lock down an API.

In this talk we will discuss the various proof of concept attempts and improvements to clang that have been done in the process of building this feature, how this information is derived using visibility attributes provided by the developer in their code, and ways clang Interface Stubs can be used by a library author to control and track an API.
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