Hi all,

Good news - the problem with using appender!string with the extern (C++) formatter class is no longer there. I've refactored the driver code to use a locking writer for both files and stdout. On a tangent, we've now found out that we cannot use ASTBase to build the AST - it does not store enough information, and also is missing some essential methods like toChars() that will inevitably be needed for the formatter to work. I've been working on using ASTCodegen instead, which comes with its own challenges of compiling imports. I hope to get it working and proceed with implementing a full traversal of the AST nodes soon.

On Friday, 27 October 2023 at 17:43:32 UTC, Prajwal S N wrote:

Are there any plans on extending ASTBase?

On Thursday, 2 November 2023 at 15:05:39 UTC, Imperatorn wrote:

At the moment, no. ASTBase was created to provide a mechanism to build a complete AST and traverse it without having to do any of the semantic analysis passes. Unfortunately, this means that the classes used to represent the nodes in ASTBase are different from the ones used in ASTCodegen. There are certain missing features which prevent us from using it for cases where we need access to the tokens present in a node (e.g. the name of an identifier, or the body of a function). Extending it for our use case would not help, since the formatter needs to be able to walk the AST and write the tokens in each node in order to obtain the original source code. Since the compiler uses ASTCodegen, the nodes provided by it contain the correct tokens, and also contain the methods required to meaningfully generate a string representation of those tokens.