TOGVM-Spec VS impulse

Make each AST node an RDF node and then you can cram whatever information into it you want. That's the approach I've been taking with https://github.com/TOGoS/TOGVM-Spec/, anyway.

Of course, for conveniently and safely manipulating in memory in $programming_language, you're probably going to want to define some structs/ADTs/whatever that only contain the data a given compilation stage is actively working with.

I've been thinking that what I need is a system that allows me to quickly define different lower-level datatypes for representing different views of the conceptual types and automate, to some degree, translation between them, so then each part of the system can work with objects designed specifically to be processed by it with minimal fuss.

A technical reason for avoiding those specialized types might be that the computer then has to spend more time transforming from one schema to the next. I would think that in practice this isn't any worse than having to do a lot of null checks.

A more human reason is that it could bean a combinatorical explosion of AST types. I guess this is where my idea about lightweight variations comes in.

In TypeScript this kind of thing might not be so bad, since any object can be downcast with no cost to a type that contains a subset of the information, and variations on types can be easily defined without even necessarily being named, e.g. `ASTNode & HasResultType & HasSourceLocation`.

As far as graph-based languages and languages with arbitrary metadata and relationships between objects are concerned, I've been mulling over a language where expressions are represented as RDF graphs and that has built-in support for manipulating RDF graphs. I've use the concepts as an intermediate representation for functional expressions in a few different systems (including Factorio's map generator), but haven't yet had the motivation to really flesh it out into a full-blown language. https://github.com/TOGoS/TOGVM-Spec

I you use Tailwind and React, you might like Impulse[1] (disclaimer: I made it and use it almost daily)

Not only does it provide means for visual editing (for Tailwind only), but it also saves all changes to your code.

Free and open source.

[1] https://impulse.dev/

I've been working exclusively on this project for half a year and... I don't really know where it's going. One of the primary goals from the beginning was to make a product I could use for most of my UI work. And oh my God, have I achieved that. Having used Impulse regularly for months (including designing Impulse itself and impulse.dev), I can't imagine going back.

You can look at a few demo videos on the website https://impulse.dev/

Trying to design some elements intuitively, just by setting classes and seeing how it looks; also prototyping. With Impulse, I can just cycle through all possible font-sizes / margins / paddings / shades of a color / you name it. I've designed the whole impulse.dev website with that approach and I don't wanna go back, it's just so much faster and fun even compared to writing code on two monitors with 10 years of experience. :D