3 ms·

Library authors don’t really provide custom analyzers. heck, the best we can hope for are some regex based linting rules, anything that involves local data flow

Library authors don’t really provide custom analyzers. heck, the best we can hope for are some regex based linting rules, anything that involves local data flow analysis is very rare, and anything inter procedural is non-existent. Program analysis is a dark hole, you are better off just making stronger type systems, but then type inference starts to bite you if you want to support it (and you will given how annoying type annotations are to write, unless you go with something simple like a purely structural type system so you can use Hindley Milner).

latentsea 1y ago
Analyzers are a first class citizen in C#. You can get access to the AST during compile time and use it to output diagnostics with error or warning level, so it's more robust than just regex. I've not seen teams personally write them because they're abstract and most devs shy away from it, but working in the C# ecosystem the one place I do see them pop up occasionally is from library authors. For example xunit has some. https://github.com/xunit/xunit.analyzers https://github.com/xunit/xunit.analyzers So far I have found the value in them to be they help you constrain the possible valid moves that can be made in a codebase. This is valuable with teams of human engineers, but even more so with LLMs. It just so happens LLMs are really good at helping you write them too given you know what you want to enforce. I doubt the tooling is as good in other languages as it is in C# in this respect, but at least for devs working in the C# ecosystem LLMs have unlocked access to writing custom analysers on a whole new level, and with that it's now significantly easier to define and enforce rules regarding what constitutes a valid program, such that the set of valid programs matches your intended architecture.

3 ms·

Library authors don’t really provide custom analyzers. heck, the best we can hope for are some regex based linting rules, anything that involves local data flow

by seanmcdirmid 1y ago

latentsea 1y ago
Analyzers are a first class citizen in C#. You can get access to the AST during compile time and use it to output diagnostics with error or warning level, so it's more robust than just regex. I've not seen teams personally write them because they're abstract and most devs shy away from it, but working in the C# ecosystem the one place I do see them pop up occasionally is from library authors. For example xunit has some. https://github.com/xunit/xunit.analyzers https://github.com/xunit/xunit.analyzers So far I have found the value in them to be they help you constrain the possible valid moves that can be made in a codebase. This is valuable with teams of human engineers, but even more so with LLMs. It just so happens LLMs are really good at helping you write them too given you know what you want to enforce. I doubt the tooling is as good in other languages as it is in C# in this respect, but at least for devs working in the C# ecosystem LLMs have unlocked access to writing custom analysers on a whole new level, and with that it's now significantly easier to define and enforce rules regarding what constitutes a valid program, such that the set of valid programs matches your intended architecture.