ariadne
ariadne copied to clipboard
zesterer
Tracking: The Big Refactor
I think it's clear that Ariadne has been successful in several domains, particularly the hobby langdev space. However, it has several limitations that a rewrite/refactor should address:
- No support for toggling colour on-and-off
- ANSI support is assumed, despite this assumption being unreasonable
- There are very few ways to customise the output (such as label ordering, for example)
- Terminal size can't be specified so label/note formatting is often broken
Additionally, there are some new features that a refactor could introduce:
- A generic DOM-like AST for reports (created using builder methods)
- More flexible structure with elements that can be arbitrarily nested
- Generic styling for elements
- Multiple backends (plaintext, ANSI, HTML, LSP JSON, etc.)
Comments welcome!
I did a tiny test implementation to try out the user facing api: https://github.com/CreatorSiSo/ariadne-next/blob/main/src/main.rs and how a specific backend would be implemented: https://github.com/CreatorSiSo/ariadne-next/blob/main/src/plaintext.rs
At the very least, providing an AST would make it a lot easier to translate ariadne reports to HTML (if HTML isn't made a first-class backend target), which is a use case I'm very interested in! Any HTML implementation would likely be fairly opinionated, so an AST might even be preferable.
One small thing that would be nice to fix: Cache::fetch returning references limits possible cache implementations (no RefCell for internally mutable caches for example).
As a point of interest, I've made some initial headway into this on the ariadne2 branch. It's very early days, but it's already capable of showing some basic diagnostics.
