Comment Handling Ideas

Proxies

• (Visitor) Own traversal mechanism
• Creation of a new AST
• Each node gets a clone with comment capabilities
• Indirection when accessing
• Own Visitor Strategy

JIT Comment Assignment

• For every node where a comment would be interesting the comment list is searched for matching comments
• Visitor for assignment
• Bad Scaling

Node Factory for AST Generation

• Change in CDT - Factory for Nodes while AST generation
• Node Factory for Commented Nodes
  • Extention of ASTNode
  • Implementation of own structure
• Direct assignment and access to comments in nodes

Comment Hash Map

• Map with nodes as key and a list of comments as value
• Created by a visitor before refactoring
• Dynamic comment determination when needed

Build Our Own Code Model

• Visit the AST and create a separate model of the code, which we could then augment with more information, like comments
  • - lots of duplication and rewriting :(
  • + we can do whatever we want with it, like moving functionality from the countless helper classes into the model. :)