Question: For every language, are you writing a full-blown language parser to get the semantic information you need? Can I hook in new parsers to add language support?
That is correct. The structural diff algorithm is generic, it operates on langauge-neutral feature trees. And those are built with the langauage-specific parsers.
> Can I hook in new parsers to add language support?
Writing a parser is not an easy job. But some day we hope to open API for developers to write custom plugins.
I've had the opportunity to write a small interpreter on the job before. Trust me: I know it is no small task to bite off something like this! Tip of the hat to you.
I'm currently stuck in the .NET world and one of the things I've been working on lately was to have a program fix certain aspects of a medium-to-large code base, but done via semantic parsing of the code base so that I know I'm typesafe and such.
In C# there are open libraries like NRefactor, of course Mono itself, and in the Microsoft world they are working on their own compiler as a service product named Roslyn. Do you think any of these efforts would even help an effort such as your are doing?
I'm asking not so much for C# stuff, but because I feel a momentum coming up that could enable stuff such as a live coding environment (my code is in execution as soon as I write it), and the idea of the debugger is the same as my production run-time (not sort of the same, but really the same). I wish up and coming languages would tackle this stuff head on today.
If anyone else is going to make something similar for .NET, then yes.
But we are going to build our own custom C# language parser.