Ideas for merged extension generator

InitialIdeas.md

An initial dump of ideas for a php generator

1. use composer and symfony console tools for cli manipulation
2. pluggable architecture

components needed - configuration parsing scanning? (helper for generating definitions) templating

I love sqlite the problem with sqlite is that i cant use a text editor in case i want to manually modify or fix something on the definitions/cache.

Before using json the original wxphp developer used serialize/unserialize but if editing was required it was almost impossible.

Php format sounds good, but parsing a huge php file would surely take some time and memory too.

In my experience json hasnt been bad and wxWidgets is a huge library check https://github.com/wxphp/wxphp/blob/master/json/classes.json

Anyways if we choose php I would be happy, everything would PHP xd even template files :D it would just require a little bit more of work at first.

An example of definitions/classes.php could be:

<?php
$class = new ClassSymbol("SomeClassName");

$class->AddMethod(
    "MethodName",
    [
        "static" => false,
        "const" => true,
        "virtual" => true,
        "pure_virtual" => false,
        "protected" => false,
        "return_type" => "const int*",
        "description" => "This method does this and that",
        "parameters" => new Parameters() //Will think on this later
    ]
);

Peg\Application->GetSymbolsTable()->AddClass($class);

//etc...

I actually have quite a bit of that already done in one fashion - see https://github.com/gtkforphp/generator/tree/master/lib/objects - - we'll need to set up the proper hierarchy - module -> package (actually this is namespace but namespace is a reserved word - we'll have similar issues with clas) -> class -> method but also namespace -> function or just package->function - then for both return values and parameters they are subclasses of args - and we should probably do a "documentation" type with info to fill in docblocks, etc

Also I didn't mention it much but we should make this with a pluggable front-end
So we can have peg-cli and peg-gtk adn peg-web versions for people to play with ;)

TODO (Reminder)

• Use CastXML to parse C/C++ header files directly and convert them to an easy to parse xml file.
• Add GIR support in order to parse GTK documentation.
• Finish codegenerator for PHP version 5 (generate classes)
• Use PHP version 5 codegenerator as base to start writing a PHP 7 code generator.
• Also add HHVM code generation support.
• Implement C++ templates support
• Write a webui that could be launched from command line (eg: peg ui) in order to graphically modify definition files and enable/disable classes, methods, functions, etc...