Description:

Development tools that work with programming languages benefit from their
ability to understand the code with which they work at a level comparable to a
compiler. C++ has become a popular and powerful language, but parsing it is a
very challenging problem. This has discouraged the development of tools meant
to work directly with the language.

There is one open-source C++ parser, the C++ front-end to GCC, which is
currently able to deal with the language in its entirety. The purpose of the
GCC-XML extension is to generate an XML description of a C++ program from GCC's
internal representation. Since XML is easy to parse, other development tools
will be able to work with C++ programs without the burden of a complicated C++
parser.

GCC-XML was developed by Brad King at Kitware to be used by CABLE, which was
developed as part of the NLM Insight Segmentation and Registration Toolkit
project.