auto-complete-clang

My bad, I assumed it included highlighting, but it appears it is just auto-complete from Clang. https://github.com/brianjcj/auto-complete-clang That being said, if the core infrastructure is there, the hard part (Clang backend) is there, how much more can semantic highlighting be? (I duck because I write amateurish code and do not do C/C++ yet, but would hopefully learn to do something awesome like that one day.)

Did you try: https://github.com/brianjcj/auto-complete-clang

Although this article was written in 2010, his general complaint still applies. Compare a code-completion engine written for Emacs, with that written for Vim: auto-complete [1] is written completely in Elisp and utilizes Semantic as a source (mentioned in the article; also full Elisp), while a completion engine for Vim can be written in C++/ Python: Python is first-class, and it's a simple matter of invoking 'py import vim' [2] (it interfaces with the C++ code by simply importing the prebuilt ycm_core.so [3]). There is still no widely-used well-maintained clang completer for Emacs; the most dominant one spawns clang for everything [4]. That said, Emacs has a very rich Elisp ecosystem that's not going away anytime soon. By focusing on extensibility from the very beginning, Emacs has done many things right (it's just an Elisp interpreter

There's an interesting Clang autocomplete mode. It is almost great, but falls short a bit for obj-c. If you deal with C/C++ all day, you should definitely check it out: https://github.com/brianjcj/auto-complete-clang