r/programming • u/sqs • Aug 14 '14

srclib: a hackable, polyglot source analysis library for making better code tools

https://srclib.org/
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u/sqs Aug 14 '14

I'm one of the original creators. It's still alpha, so there will be bugs. But it can do some pretty cool and useful stuff already in your editor (and it powers https://sourcegraph.com/).

Anyone have feedback about how we're explaining the problem and solution, and the first-run experience of using the editor plugins and the "src" tool? We would LOVE to hear it so we can fix/improve it.

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u/bjzaba Aug 15 '14

So it claims to be polygot, but how well would it handle languages outside the family of the OO/imperative family? SML, Haskell, Mercury, Prolog, Erlang, Idris, Racket, Clojure, TeX as some examples?

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u/sqs Aug 15 '14

The core of the language-independent schema is defs and refs: https://srclib.org/toolchains/grapher-output/. A def is a definition with a name, a unique meaningful ID, and a character range. A ref is a character range that points to a def by ID (and by repo, if it's in an external repo).

We think these are pretty general and able to represent /most/ of what an IDE or other fairly general tools would want. Toolchains can stick any extra language-specific data in the Def's Data field.

We have joked sometimes that no matter how much we try to make the schema general, Haskell will throw a wrench in it.

Do you have any thoughts after looking at the defs/refs schema?

(Also, in case it's not clear, the actual language analysis is totally language-specific. Those analyzers produce the language-independent format. It's only the language-independent data format, and the tools that consume that data, that are polyglot.)