The wheel of reincarnation is a common phenomena in computing. So is forgetting what was learned on previous trips around the wheel.https://twitter.com/tazsingh/status/977864328199188480 …
Since these communities are the targets of the "forgetting lessons" critique, I want to gently push back. Instead, I think we should cheer on these kinds of processes and help those interested in learning from the past do so.
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I certainly wasn’t intending to critique any specific communities. Just a thought triggered by a tweet. I absolutely will cheer on such processes and encourage them to more broadly disseminate their experiences.
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Concretely, are you thinking of specific prior art for retaining high fidelity source information across many-stage compilation pipelines where the steps are built by different people, and where the output is a single file (like an executable binary)?
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Well, a deep literature search is always a good starting point. Also, Eclipse and VisualStudio are both examples of systems with an extensible language services API and plugin architect.
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I work on these kinds of systems and do literature searches, but: 1. Papers are very often not available without significant $ 2. Papers are very rarely (but not never) relevant to these software engineering questions 3. Visual Studio is closed source
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4. The issue is source-to-source pipelines, not language services. They're connected but source to source pipelines need more decoupling and lean harder on standardization.
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5. Today's JS tooling is by far better than anything that these other systems have done *for JS*, especially on the static analysis front, despite very significant efforts in those systems to support JS.
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The issue is one of standardization, both around the "spec" (which could use some improvement) and shared abstractions (so people tend to build compilation stages that produce high fidelity output).
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Low level tools like jscodeshift/recast do a good job at this, but small details do us in. One example of a small detail is inconsistency in tooling about where to put the sourcemap, and how to communicate where you want it to go
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