I remember once upon a time I thought C was fairly simple, so I decided to write a program to generate ASTs from C programs. I was very wrong and it was kind of a nightmare. There are so many weird little quirks or lesser-used features that I never saw in the wild even in large production codebases; I feel like you really don't _need_ a lot of these features. I can't imagine doing proper compiler work, especially for something like C++. Nice article.
> I remember once upon a time I thought C was fairly simple, so I decided to write a program to generate ASTs from C programs.
Oh man, I think we all have been this young and naive at some point.
I have spent time working with compilers for this purpose (having realized I did not want to attempt parsing source and generating the AST) and decided it is much easier to let them do the work. That being said, it can still be more than a handful (both GCC and Clang have their eccentricities) and depending on how you are using it you still might be in over your head.
When you start a project like this and end up failing because you simply do not have the depth of knowledge or time to see it to completion it often feels a bit demoralizing from the loss of investment. Truthfully though, having started many such ventures (emulators for 6502 and 80386 to name a few), you get all the benefit of experience from working on a difficult problems without the misery of debugging and model checking until everything until is more/less perfect. It's great fun, you learn a lot, and you should never avoid trying simply because it might be too much to handle.
