Hey all, just wondering if in the baml toolchain there is a supported api or cli for static source analysis? I mean beyond compilation and symbol description? I am thinking something like tserver? or ts-morph? It's not a hard issue for me, but does shape a decision for me in the project I am using to explore baml

we have recently added full reflection into the runtime! Though it doesn't yet have span information and such.

reflect.Package.compile(<code>)

we are currently thinking about making a clippy equivalent (linter) that can be extendable by BAML defined code and as a part of that, i suspect we'd expose AST + typechecking functions directly in BAML so you can parse various things.

Can we ask what the decision is?

I am exploring some ideas about code reviews that focus on architecture and design and using this to explore baml at the same time. I was thinking about dog fooding the process with baml code but I would need some static source analysis tools. I can just as easily build some typescript for this. Hence the decision - I will use baml to own the cli, orchestration, and typescript dependency isolation, and the model part. Then I can dog food with the typescript dependencies that do the rule evaluations using ts-morph, etc

I think my recommendation is to fork the BAML toolchain - if you have your agent inspect the implementation of

baml describe

and

baml lsp

, there's quite a lot of work that's gone into the compiler to produce well-defined symbols. Re-implementing that yourself would be challenging to get right reliably. The first few compiler phases are relatively stable at this point - there are some things that are still evolving - but between the two options of 1. rolling your own TS parser/lexer + IR + type checker to get something that works on 70% of code, and 2. reusing the production BAML toolchain internals that works on 99% of code, and updating it when BAML compiler internals change I think (2) is a more attractive maintenance burden for you, even if we can't make promises about the AST stability

cheers for that I will rejoin the baml meetings soon love what's going on here