If you're writing a tool that needs access to the C++ AST (i.e. documentation generator, reflection library, …), your only option apart from writing your own parser is to use clang. It offers three interfaces for tools, but the only one that really works for standalone applications is libclang. However, libclang has various limitations and does not expose the entire AST. So there is no feasible option — except for this library. It was originally a part of the standardese documentation generator, but has been extracted into an independent library.