Well this is interesting, I recently spent a weekend creating a 'splicing compiler', which could take a typescript project split up into features, where a feature was written in just one single typescript file. Each section of code could then specify new 'code hooks', for future code to insert itself at during compilation.

My original inspiration was that English language is spoken sequentially, but ends up in a graph database (i.e. the brain's neural network). So you'd write code like a thesis, and the hooks you specify would allow the splicer to form the code graph.

In theory it seemed like it would be useful, so I built Pacman with it and, well, it didn't really work in practice! Things ended up being more abstract in the end, and I'd be mentally juggling where hooks were created and what the final code would look like. Even showing the code output to the right wasn't that helpful, as the way the code was spliced together put things in not the most readable order.

Additionally how to split up the code wasn't the most obvious, i.e. when should a hook be added? It often felt I'd only know after writing the code in full. At which point it just felt like extra work. I'd often find myself to be inserting code all over the place to get something working, and so the refactoring needed at the end became overwhelming. Ultimately these reasons lead me to abandon the idea.