navc is a daemon to index and navigate your C code. It watches for all file changes and automatically update the index. It provides a RPC API to ask for definition, declaration, calls, and uses of some symbol. This API can be used by any editor plugin to point to the correct location of the looked up symbol. navc uses clang to parse the file. Having the abstract syntax tree of the code can be very powerful as it can know with greater exactitude the location of the declaration or definition being looked up. The project is limited to C for now, but it can be extended to C++ as clang it is able to parse it.
navc is in its early stages. There is still plenty of code to be written.
- Uses of a symbol
- Definition of a function
- (All) Declaration of a symbol: functions, variables, typedef, enums, defines
- Implementations of a function pointer (is this possible?)
- Assignments of a variable
For the daemon you need the following libraries:
- libclang: https://github.com/sbinet/go-clang
- fsnotify: https://github.com/go-fsnotify/fsnotify
- sqlite3: https://github.com/mattn/go-sqlite3
For the vim plugin to work, you need vim with python support. You also need to include the jsonrpc file in the PYTHONPATH env variable. Examples can be found in navc.vim.
- Fix backup of in-memory database. Currently, the connection for the backup can be gone when performing the backup. We need to create a fresh connection each time we have a backup.
- Do we really need to periodically update the DB? Maybe backing up at daemon shutdown is enough.
- We need to introduce the dependency between files so that all the dependents get updated as soon as a file changes.
- Find a way to parse files in parallel either by concurrently writing to the DB or have a map/reduce kind of format where map=parse, reduce=insert in DB.
- Complete vim plugin for use.
- Have better logging and not log everything. In particular, it would be nice to have a progress bar while indexing code at start up.
This is not a official Google project and it is not supported by Google Inc.