microsoft / microsoft/ifc

Revisit `BasicSpecifiers::External` for user-authored `extern`

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Dominant language
C++
Stars
76
Forks
19
PR merge metrics
No merged PRs in 30d

Description

Revisit this one the IFC has a better representation for the syntactic extern on function declarations vs compiler-generated/implicit external-linkage.

e.g.

extern void f();
void g();

On MSVC, both of the functions above have external-linkage, but BasicSpecifiers::External is insufficient for telling us whether the user wrote extern or external-linkage was generated by the compiler.

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Research direction

Start by reviewing BasicSpecifiers::External and the IFC representation used for function declarations. Compare extern void f(); with void g(); and define the representation needed to distinguish user-authored extern from compiler-generated external linkage; done means the two cases are distinguishable.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
cpp
Domain
compilers
Issue type
Refactor
Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Mostly clear
Newbie friendliness
35/100

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