In the SaC codebase a number of *.c and *.h files are generated automatically using XSLT transformations and the ast.xml file which describes the internal structure of the AST and traversals as well as criteria for their internal consistency.

Currently the structure of ast.xml is nowhere documented, and most importantly, is not checked for consistency. Also, the XSLT-based file generation is slow.

The purpose of this project is to:

• introduced JSON-based configuration files that would replace ast.xml
• document the format of the configuration files
• write a fast validator that will check consistency of the configuration files
• replace XSLT-based generation with faster and cleaner C99-based.

If the project will be successful, then we will get a verified and fast source file generation in a more compact and simpler format, without dependencies on xsltproc and indent. This might enable us to:

• add more JSON-based configuration files, for example:
  • replacing prf_info.mac as it got too complex for a header file
  • unifying options and flags in a single config file
  • types_info.mac?
• Replace existing serialisation facilities by those that producing JSON files. That should save compilation time, as we won't need to compile tree files anymore. Also, given that such a serialisation can happen in the middle of the compilation, it will be possible to restart the compilation with a potentially modified AST. This opens up a great potential for experiments and debugging.

The migration plan includes:

• Converting xml.ast into *.json
• Writing a validator for *.json
• Documenting the structure of *.json files
• Porting the HTML page
• Porting the existing XSLT files
• types/types_trav.h.xsl
• types/types_nodetype.h.xsl
• tree/traverse_tables.h.xsl
• tree/traverse_tables.c.xsl
• tree/traverse_helper.c.xsl
• tree/sons.h.xsl
• tree/node_basic.h.xsl
• tree/node_basic.c.xsl
• tree/node_alloc.h.xsl
• tree/free_node.h.xsl
• tree/free_node.c.xsl
• tree/free_attribs.h.xsl
• tree/check_reset.h.xsl
• tree/check_reset.c.xsl
• tree/check_node.h.xsl
• tree/check_node.c.xsl
• tree/check.h.xsl
• tree/check.c.xsl
• tree/attribs.h.xsl
• serialize/serialize_node.h.xsl
• serialize/serialize_node.c.xsl
• serialize/serialize_link.h.xsl
• serialize/serialize_link.c.xsl
• serialize/serialize_helper.c.xsl
• serialize/serialize_buildstack.h.xsl
• serialize/serialize_buildstack.c.xsl
• serialize/serialize_attribs.h.xsl
• global/node_info.mac.xsl
• Replacing serialisation with json-based conversions
• Introducing dump/restore at every phase.

• The ast.xml is the current XML-based description of the AST.
• *.py are scripts to convert XML to JSON and do some cleanup.
• The validation and code generation are in yajl-validate.
• The HTML page is in the `html' directory.

Currently the validation with large number of checks takes 0.2 seconds versus 28.4 taken by the XML/XSLT.

time (for f in $(find src/libsac2c -name '*.c.xsl' -or -name '*.h.xsl' -or -name '*.mac.xsl'); do \
         xsltproc $f src/libsac2c/xml/ast.xml | indent > "/tmp/x" ; done)