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

You need to have the development headers for clang. In Ubuntu this is the package libclang_dev. Once this is installed, you need to simply run:

	CGO_CFLAGS="-I`llvm-config --includedir`" \
	CGO_LDFLAGS="-L`llvm-config --libdir`" \
	go get github.com/google/navc

The binary will be located in $GOPATH/bin/navc.

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.

• 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.
• Currently, to update the compile_commands.json file in memory, the daemon has to be restarted. This can be fixed easily by simply watching all the compile_commands.json files and update the database in memory if it changed.
• 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.

This is not a official Google project and it is not supported by Google Inc.