Babelfish is a self-hosted server for source code parsing. Babelfish can parse any file, in any language, extract an ASTs (Abstract Syntax Tree) from it, and convert it to a UAST (Universal Abstract Syntax Tree).
Some of the use cases that we want to support with AST are:
- AST-based diff'ing. Understanding changes made to code with finer-grained granularity. Is this commit changing variable names? Is it adding a loop?
- Import extraction. Extracting all imports from every language in a uniform way.
- Extract representation for Data Science experiments. For example, extracting a list of all tokens for every file, or a list of all function calls,etc.
- Making statistics of language features. How many people uses for-comprehension in Python?
- Detecting similar coding patterns across languages.