Re: [PATCH 00/38] docs: several improvements to kernel-doc

[Jani Nikula <jani.nikula@linux.intel.com>]

On Mon, 23 Feb 2026, Jonathan Corbet <corbet@lwn.net> wrote:
> Jani Nikula <jani.nikula@linux.intel.com> writes:
>
>> There's always the question, if you're putting a lot of effort into
>> making kernel-doc closer to an actual C parser, why not put all that
>> effort into using and adapting to, you know, an actual C parser?
>
> Not speaking to the current effort but ... in the past, when I have
> contemplated this (using, say, tree-sitter), the real problem is that
> those parsers simply strip out the comments.  Kerneldoc without comments
> ... doesn't work very well.  If there were a parser without those
> problems, and which could be made to do the right thing with all of our
> weird macro usage, it would certainly be worth considering.

I think e.g. libclang and its Python bindings can be made to work. The
main problems with that are passing proper compiler options (because
it'll need to include stuff to know about types etc. because it is a
proper parser), preprocessing everything is going to take time, you need
to invest a bunch into it to know how slow exactly compared to the
current thing and whether it's prohitive, and it introduces an extra
dependency.

So yeah, there are definitely tradeoffs there. But it's not like this
constant patching of kernel-doc is exactly burden free either. I don't
know, is it just me, but I'd like to think as a profession we'd be past
writing ad hoc C parsers by now.


BR,
Jani.


-- 
Jani Nikula, Intel