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Comment by rtpg | Hacker News Reader

So an awk but that knows how to walk structures instead of just lines. Excellent!

I'm a big fan of semgrep letting me query ASTs, this feels like something in a similar space. Down with lines, up with everything being trees!

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Have you checked ast-grep and gritql?

Are these alternatives to semgrep?

More or less, yes. CLI, offline, no need for a cloud account. Used ast-grep successfully to locate bad code blocks (dynamic typing, don't even get me started) and also to replace them with others. Highly recommended.

Semgrep also a CLI, that can run offline and without a cloud account.

At work, we use it for enforcing a bunch of custom lint rules configured as a yaml file committed directly to our repo, entirely cloud-free.

(I may be overreading your comment as suggesting that these were reasons to use ast-grep over semgrep.)

ast-grep is based on treesitter. I found Semgrep great for simple things but impossible due to edge cases for complicated things. ast-grep is more difficult for simple cases but all the information you need is there for complex cases.

Semgrep is also based on tree sitter

As the other sibling commenter said, both `ast-grep` and `gritql` are based on Treesitter which means that you can in fact just look for certain function call and it will be found no matter how it's formatted, something that plain grep and sometimes semgrep I am not sure can do.

I have used `ast-grep` to devise my own linters with crushing success.

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