API for gogrep matching engine about gogrep HOT 4 OPEN

Sorry that I never replied here. To be honest, I've gotten tired of working on the gogrep project for now, and I don't know when I'll actively get back to it. I assume you already saw the refactor branch linked in #32; that was my latest thinking when it comes to a reusable API.

If you want anything other than that, I would suggest to fork or copy code, as that will be the fastest and simplest way. I will probably resurrect/redesign this project at some point in the future, but it's not going to be in the immediate future.

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As an example usage, I have a linter that wants to flag cases where methods of certain types don't call out to their "super" -- that is, where you have a declaration

func (recv *SomeType) SomeMethod(...) ...

which does not call

recv.<something>.SomeMethod(...)

So one part of that is to look for expressions of the form $x.$y.SomeMethod(...), but then we want to get back $x so we can check if it's a reverence to recv (easy, using go/types); and more importantly we only want to do the entire search within some function-declaration. Ideally, we might even vary look for a specific $y depending on the type we're looking at. (Right now we're just doing manual ast traversal -- call, ok := node.(*ast.CallExpr); if !ok { return false } and repeat -- and it's kind of a mess, which is why I'm looking at gogrep.)

The former constraint we could do with some loss of fidelity (due to shadowing) with gogrep alone, something like func ($x $_) $y($*_) $*_ { $*_; $x.$_.$y($*_); $*_ }. But the latter two we really just need types to figure out. I guess in principle we could call out to gogrep to search for each func ($x <specific type>) <specific method-name>($*_) ..., but that seems at best very slow. Of course, we could ask for a way to search " within ", but that feels like a kludge on both sides: you have to add a bunch of syntax, and we are still very constrained in what we can do.

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Totally understandable and appreciate the guidance! I'll post here if I end up forking.

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@benjaminjkraft I would love to have an API, too.
We might be able to work together on it.

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