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There is probably no such thing, because it would be hard to map programming language concepts onto each other perfectly. OK, you could have a union of those co

There is probably no such thing, because it would be hard to map programming language concepts onto each other perfectly. OK, you could have a union of those concepts in the IR, but the the benefit of IR would disappear, because you will have to deal with all the things on the next layer.

dcreager 3y ago
This is exactly right. You either end up with something very low-level (on the level of LLVM IR, for instance)—which means you aren't constructing and analyzing high-level language constructs anymore—or with something high-level but with many language-specific special cases grafted on. Where we've found success is in stepping back and creating formalisms that are language-agnostic to begin with, and then using tree-sitter to manage the language-specific translations into that formalism. A good example is how we use stack graphs for precise code navigation [1], which uses a graph structure to encode a language's name binding semantics, and which we build up for several languages from tree-sitter parse trees [2]. [1] https://dcreager.net/talks/stack-graphs/ https://dcreager.net/talks/stack-graphs/ [2] https://github.com/github/stack-graphs/tree/main/languages https://github.com/github/stack-graphs/tree/main/languages