Hacker News Reader

Comment by noselasd | Hacker News Reader

Will it be doxygen compatible ?

Most of our C and C++ code is documented with what's pretty close to Javadoc comments, which is one of the flavors doxygen understands. We are certainly not going to rewrite comments for another tool even if we'd like to use that tool.

Pretty much all code I've seen that's documented to be used with a documentation extraction have been doxygen, or some flavor that doxygen can handle.

View on HN

Partial support for other formats is planned. It's quite obvious that all currently documented C++ is using one of the existing formats and that it's nonsense to expect people to convert their already written documentation. The question is exactly how much of the other types of syntax needs to be supported to be useful.

This is the key question. In an ideal world it would parse Doxygen-compatible comments and output to the Doxygen XML file format so it can then be rendered by Doxygen's HTML generator. Keep this tool focussed on the parsing etc. and let Doxygen continue to do what it does well.

In my mind Doxygen is a fantastic tool and its only drawback in my experience is its slightly simplistic parsing engine which means it's slow to adapt to new language features.

clang already supports the doxygen/javadoc commenting itself. At least, it has a warning named -Wdocumentation in the latest release from Apple that tells me that in my documentation I have a variable that is not anywhere in the function signature!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com