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uncrap

The idea behind this project is to provide tools to uncrap your c code (may expand to other languages in the future).

Status

This is super duper alpha! The API and project structure will definitely change.

Goals

• We want this to be as easy to use as possible.
• Users should not need to setup lengthy project configs.
• Quick and dirty tools for users is our focus.
• We want to be as close to the code text as possible to make our tools more useful/versatile. This prevents using any parser that loses any code text position information.
• Most tools should be web friendly as it allows anyone to use very quickly. We may provide more advanced tools in the future that do not need to be web friendly.

Plans

There will be an UncrapCore which will include things like parsers, and other utilities that operate purely on code/text with no GUI or assumption of target (node/web). Then there will be various front ends developed for web and node.

Contributing

see here.

Design Decisions

Why not use a heavy weight parser?

We might one day, but for right now, it seems like over kill and doesn't align well with project goals.

Tried ANTLRv4, but didn't like it for a few reasons:

• the input code needs to be run through a preprocessor to remove preprocessor directives first. This is a pain because we first need a proper preprocessor and then we also lose the original text location of code.
• it also doesn't produce an AST which is really what you want.
• needs additional work to keep comments.
• it does however have a C11 grammar https://github.com/antlr/grammars-v4/blob/master/c/C.g4.

Looked at pycparser for python, but it needs to be able to resolve EVERYTHING!

• Way too much work/fuss for users of quick and dirty tools like uncrap.