gcgen Documentation

gcgen aims to provide a minimal, yet useful tool to aid with code generation, predominantly by allowing you to weave snippets of generated code in among otherwise hand-written code, though generating entire files from scratch is also supported.

gcgen is written for ease of use, thus it:

• Enables active code-generation

• Allows generated code to be mixed in among hand-written code

• Separates generator code from the project’s source files

• Introduces very few concepts to learn

• Provides the full expressive power and library ecosystem of the Python programming language

Contents

• Getting Started
  • Example
  • A high-level introduction to gcg
• Motivation
  • Writing reusable code is hard
  • Code is liability
  • Summary
• Design Choices
  • Keep it simple (KISS)
  • Use a general-purpose language (Python)
  • Separate code-generation logic from regular content
  • Mix hand-written and generated code in files
• Installing gcgen
  • User-wide
  • Isolated
  • Isolated, but global (pipx)
• Starting a project
  • How gcgen determines the project folder
  • Configuring the project
• gcgen file
  • Parse files
  • Extend the Scope
  • Configure indentation
• Scope
  • Scope Examples
  • How the scope is built
• Snippets
  • Using snippets in a file
  • Defining a snippet
  • How to use snippets effectively
• Generators
  • write_file helper
• Section
  • Example
  • Section API
• gcgen API
  • NodeTransformer
  • NodeVisitor
  • Scope
  • Section
  • generator()
  • get_snippet()
  • on_transform()
  • on_visit()
  • parse_tree()
  • snippet()
  • write_file

Indices and tables

• Index

• Module Index

• Search Page