Semantic
Parsing, analyzing, and comparing source code across many languages
semantic is a Haskell library and command line tool for parsing, analyzing, and comparing source code. Run semantic --help for complete list of up-to-date options. Semantic uses tree-sitter to generate parse trees, but layers in a more generalized notion of syntax terms across all supported programming languages. We'll see why this is important when we get to diffs and program analysis, but for now let's just inspect some output. It helps to have a simple program to parse. Symbols are named identifiers driven by the ASTs. This is the format that github.com uses to generate code navigation information allowing c-tags style lookup of symbolic names for fast, incremental navigation in all the supported languages. The incremental part is important because files change often so we want to be able to parse just what's changed and not have to analyze the entire project again.