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by sanketsaurav 481 days ago
> One of the main benefits of Semgrep is its unified DSL that works across all supported languages.

> People can disagree, but I'm not sure that tree-sitter S-expressions as an upgrade over a DSL.

100% agree — a DSL is a better user experience for sure. But this is a deliberate choice we made of not inventing a new DSL and using tree-sitter natively. We've directly addressed this and agree that the S-expressions are gnarly; but we're optimizing for a scenario that you wouldn't need to write this by hand anyway.

It's a trade-off. We don't want to spend time inventing a DSL and port every language's idiosyncrasies to that DSL — we'd rather improve our runtime and add support for things that other tools don't support, or support only on a paid tier (like cross-file analysis — which you can do on Globstar today).

1 comments

That makes a lot of sense. I wish you the best of luck and will be happy to try it out as you continue to develop it!