Code Completion Design

How to build

Get the source code

When you download the svn source code of code::blocks,(see here Installing_Code::Blocks_from_source_on_Windows#Code::Blocks_sources the source code of CodeCompletion plugin was already included.

See a screen shot of these code opened in code::blocks under windows below.

Build the code completion plug in

Code completion build target option in code::blocks

Note, you should use "update.bat" to copy the new generated dll to the destination and strip the debug information. Here is the modified bat file which only update CodeCompletion.DLL.

@echo off

setlocal

echo Creating output directory tree

set CB_DEVEL_RESDIR=devel\share\CodeBlocks
set CB_OUTPUT_RESDIR=output\share\CodeBlocks

set ZIPCMD=zip

xcopy /D /y %CB_DEVEL_RESDIR%\plugins\codecompletion.dll %CB_OUTPUT_RESDIR%\plugins\codecompletion.dll

echo Stripping debug info from output tree

strip %CB_OUTPUT_RESDIR%\plugins\codecompletion.dll

see Installing_Code::Blocks_from_source_on_Windows for more information.

Low level parser

For someone haven't heard what does "Token" and "Tokenize" means, you should read the wikibooks article A brief explain of what does a parser do and Tokenize on wikipedia. Shortly, a parser treats your C++ or C code as a large array of characters, then this big string was divided to small atom strings, meanwhile "spaces" and "comments" were ignored.

for a simple c++ program like below

int main()
{
    std::cout << "hello world" << std::endl;
    return 0;
}

After Tokenized it should give these 15 tokens

1 = string "int"
2 = string "main"
3 = opening parenthesis
4 = closing parenthesis
5 = opening brace
6 = string "std"
7 = namespace operator
8 = string "cout"
9 = << operator
10 = string ""hello world""
11 = string "endl"
12 = semicolon
13 = string "return"
14 = number 0
15 = closing brace

Tokenizer class

There are several steps to running the Tokenizer class

• A thread must be created to parse a source file.
• Open the source file and convert the file buff to Unicode mode.(since we are all using Unicode build of code::blocks, and ANSI mode is outdated).
• The class contains a Pointer to the current position of the character, so, you can Get or Peek the current character.
• Nested Value was kept to indicate your are in the correct brace pair.

Return a correct token

Special token should be replaced for parsing correctly. For example, in the standard c++ header (mingw), there are a string named "_GLIBCXX_STD", this should be replaced to "std". See the dialog below.

The inline function in the Tokenizer class will check whether a token should be replaced before return.

   //This is a map, check the first string and return the second string
   inline const wxString& ThisOrReplacement(const wxString& str) const
   {
       ConfigManagerContainer::StringToStringMap::const_iterator it = s_Replacements.find(str);
       if (it != s_Replacements.end())
           return it->second;
       return str;
   }

Setting the replacement mapping. Note that two many replacement mapping will slow down the parsing performance.

High level parser

Token

For boosting the speed of allocating Tokens, the "new" and "delete" operator were overloaded in it's base class say "class Token : public BlockAllocated<Token, 10000>". In BlockAllocated class, there is only a static member say "static BlockAllocator<T, pool_size, debug> allocator;" to keep all the pre-allocated memorys for all derived class.10000 means 10000 Tokens were allocated.

Operator new overloading for fast allocate in the heap

TokenTree

Each identifier will be recorded in the TokenTree for later usage.

UI issue

Debug Log output

If you want to debug your plug-in, you may need to Logout the debug information. Mostly, here is the code Manager::Get()->GetLogManager()->DebugLog(_("XXXXX "));

Also, you need start the codeblocks with the command line argument. For example in windows.

codeblocks.exe --debug-log

then a Code::blocks debug panel will be shown to display the log.

Debug Log output panel