[conartist6]

https://github.com/bablr-lang/

I'm building a universal DOM for code so that we should see an explosion in code whose purpose is to help clean up other code.

If you want to write code that makes changes to a tree of HTML nodes, you can pretty much write that code once and it will run in any web browser.

If you want to write code that makes a new program by changing a tree of syntax nodes, there are an incredible number of different and wholly incompatible environments for that code to run in. Transform authors are likely forced to pick one or two engines to support, and anyone who needs to run a lot of codemods will probably need to install 5-10 different execution engines.

Most people seem not to notice or care about this situation or realize that their tools are vastly underserving their potential just because we can't come up with the basic standards necessary to enable universal execution of codemod code, which also means there are drastically lower incentives to write custom codemods and lint rules than there could/should be

[mdaniel]

Who is the consumer for the JSX noise that is happening here? https://github.com/bablr-lang/language-en-ruby/blob/550ad6fd...

As two nits, https://docs.bablr.org/reference/cstml and https://bablr.org/languages/universe/ruby are both 404, but I suspect that latter one is just falling into the same trap as many namespaces make of using a URL when they meant it as a URN

[conartist6]

We're cleaning up the broken links as time goes on, but it is probably obvious to you from browsing around that some parts of the site are still very much under construction.

The JSX noise is CSTML, a data format for encoding/storing parse trees. It's our main product. E.g. a simple document might look something like `<*BooleanLiteral> 'true' </>`. It's both the concrete syntax and the semantic metadata offered as a single data stream.

The easiest way to consume a CSTML document is to print the code stored in it, e.g. `printSource(parseCSTML(document))`, which would get you `true` for my example doc. Since we store all the concrete syntax printing the tree is guaranteed to get you the exact same input program the parser saw. This means you can use this to rearrange trees of source code and then print them over the original, allowing you to implement linters, pretty-printers, or codemod engines.

These CSTML documents also contain all the information necessary to do rich presentation of the code document stored within (syntax highlighting). I'm going to release our native syntax highlighter later today hopefully!

[lsaferite]

Where does this "universal DOM for code" sit in relation to CSTs and ASTs?

[conartist6]

It's an immutable btree-based format for syntax trees which contain information both abstract and concrete. Our markup language for serializing the trees is Concrete Syntax Tree Markup Language, or CSTML.