NAnanny·Oct 14, 2015
People can and do use libclang for AST info in the same manner that you're talking about: https://github.com/Sarcasm/irony-mode
In Emacs maintainer steps downSarcasm
irony-mode
Emacs Lisp2014–2017
Sarcasm / irony-mode
irony-mode
A C/C++ minor mode for Emacs powered by libclang
6Distinct people
7Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
907GitHub stars
What to know before exploring
What it is
A C/C++ minor mode for Emacs powered by libclang
GitHub
Where it is used
No documented product use has been verified yet.
What people are saying
No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.
No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.
Also in these discussions
No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.
This week on Hacker News
Nov 8–Nov 15 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/15/2026, 7:02:26 AM UTC.
No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by year7 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2014-08-04 17:53:05 UTC to 2017-05-12 09:46:13 UTC.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2014 | 2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2015 | 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 0 | 2 |
| 2016 | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 3 | 0 | 3 |
| 2017 | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
What Hacker News says
2 sourcesI work on a large C++ codebase in emacs. I find emacs keybindings and extensibility (via elisp) far superior to any IDE - and I have tried Eclipse, CLion (IDEA for C++), Code/Blocks and Netbeans.
For C/C++ specifically, the state of code analysis in emacs has greatly improved due to clang. For example, I get full auto-complete (including for variables declared 'auto') in emacs with irony-mode [0] for code completion, flycheck-irony [1] for on-the-fly syntax checking, and I get jump to definition/find references/etc via clang-ctags [2]. I assume vim has similar extensions.
[0] - https://github.com/Sarcasm/irony-mode
[1] - https://github.com/Sarcasm/flycheck-irony
[2] - https://github.com/drothlis/clang-ctags
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