quala | custom type systems for Clang

quala is a C++ library. quala has no bugs, it has no vulnerabilities, it has a Permissive License and it has low support. You can download it from GitHub.

. This is an experiment in adding overlay type systems to LLVM and Clang, inspired by Java 8’s [JSR-308][] and the [Checker Framework][]. [Checker Framework]: [JSR-308]: User-customizable type systems make it possible to add optional checks to a language without hacking the compiler. The world is full of great ideas for one-off type systems that help identify specific problems—SQL injection, say—but it’s infeasible to expect all of these to be integrated into a language spec or a compiler. Who would want to deal with hundreds of type system extensions they’re not really using?. Java’s JSR-308 invented a clever solution to this problem: make type systems pluggable. Add support to the language for arbitrary type annotations and then let users load in libraries that provide typing rules for whatever system they can dream up. I want to port this idea to C and C++ with a twist: I need custom type qualifiers to be visible in an intermediate representation so they’re available to heavyweight compiler machinery. This is an attempt to permit type qualifiers and custom type checkers in Clang that record their types as metadata in the resultant LLVM IR.