What (if anything) would we lose if we're just shipping around AST's and their associated deltas?
Would we lose formatting, etc?
Would we lose formatting, etc?
Strongly disagree. Maybe if you're in a very domain constrained environment, i vould see this being valuable. But i write graphics and simulation code all day, which involves a lot of translating math expressions. A compiler insisting on me using PascalCase (like for example .net uses) leads to very unreadable translations of formulas. And I'm not of the opinion that a system making me rewrite variable names to "meaningful names" helps understanding of the underlying math much, if you need to do symbol manipulation, or read backgrounds papers anyway.
Trust your users. Give them the tools to enforce safety barriers for themselves. Give them sensible defaults, sure. But give them ways to opt-out if they know that they need to break the conventions.
More languages should have a single, mandatory way to
format code, without any ways to opt out.
In Ruby land, Rubocop has been a win at the companies where I've worked. Greatly reduces grumbling about formatting. And VSCode/Sublime/etc can format code automatically.
Basically you'd lose the entire source representation of your code so you are essentially shipping binaries at that point. You could annotate the AST with hints to recover the original source, but once you have an AST you also have the option of transpiling to other languages/representations.
This is essentially what things like the JVM, .Net, wasm, and any sort of embedded virtual machine are. The AST is kind of just the byte-code that gets executed since the machine abstraction isn't really tied to physical architecture.