Hello everyone!

I thought I'd ask before diving straight into an implementation. I am using dmd as a library and I have a use case where being able to compare AST nodes would be really helpful.

My question is: is this doable in DMD, or is it a reason it hasn't been implemented so far? Do you guys consider it would be a valuable addition to DMD, or it wouldn't go through?

On Sunday, 7 May 2023 at 17:34:53 UTC, Lucian Danescu wrote:

Most likely the reason it hasn't been implemented is that DMD itself doesn't need to compare AST nodes in order to compile D code.

For the same reason, my guess is that such code would not be accepted as a contribution, because the DMD developers would not want to take on the job of maintaining code that DMD does not use.

If you would like to make your AST comparison code available to other projects that use DMD as a library, I would recommend publishing it as a separate package on code.dlang.org. You can list the official dmd package as a dependency.