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How stable are Clang's internals? Are you supposed to be able to write your own Clang tools and link them dynamically, or are they mostly distributed and built together with the Clang source code? (i.e. like Linux drivers where there is no stable interface.)

I know that LLVM is notable for not maintaining API stability -- not sure about Clang.

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There are (roughly) two ways of using Clang as a library. The first is a via a C-based API into a libclang.so. This is an API designed to be extremely stable, is fairly powerful, and works relatively well.

That API doesn't expose absolutely everything though, which is one reason it can be so stable. Tools that need more are typically shipped and built along side the clang source code. CLIF is the latter.

You can read about both of them here:

http://clang.llvm.org/docs/Tooling.html

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