I&#x27;m trying to get into refactoring (and even semantic analysis, and code-generation) for large C++ codebases using libclang, libtool, and the ilk.<p>Any guides to get started, and&#x2F;or best practices?<p>Does it increase productivity by order of magnitude? (I&#x27;d like to think so. I think it&#x27;s madness not to use any AST tool when working on large codebases).<p>Also I&#x27;m assuming &quot;white-box&quot; C&#x2F;C++ tools like libclang&#x2F;libtooling are much more powerful than black-box ones (like eclipse CDT), because of extensibility&#x2F;programmability. Any comments, experiences?<p>what I&#x27;m trying to say is that a non-IDE but programmable editor (vim&#x2F;emacs) combined with programmable libclang&#x2F;libtooling, would trump a prepackaged IDE (like Visual Studio, Eclipse+CDT) by a wide margin. (of course there would be quite a bit of programming involved though).