ast-grep VS crates.io

This article illustrates the usage of ast-grep, a tool designed to locate and substitute patterns in your codebase, towards easing your migration to React 19.

This looks great, thanks for building and sharing it.

Interested folks may also want to check out ast-grep:

https://github.com/ast-grep/ast-grep

ast-grep is a command-line tool that lets you search and transform code written in many programming languages using abstract syntax trees (ASTs). ASTs are data structures that capture the syntactic and semantic structure of source code. With ast-grep, you can write patterns as if you are writing ordinary code, and it will match all code that has the same syntactical structure. And if you need more power, you can use YAML, a rule system that allows you to write more sophisticated linting rules or code modifications.

I really like this - it means the tool is available to people with familiarity of any of those four distribution mechanisms.

You can also download pre-built binaries from their releases page: https://github.com/ast-grep/ast-grep/releases/tag/0.14.2

On top of that, they offer API bindings for it in three different languages:

- Rust (not yet stable): https://docs.rs/ast-grep-core/latest/ast_grep_core/

- JavaScript/TypeScript: https://ast-grep.github.io/guide/api-usage/js-api.html

- Python: https://ast-grep.github.io/guide/api-usage/py-api.html

It's rare to see a tool/library offer this depth of language support out of the box.

Is there an open source library that does this? Maybe something on top of ast-grep

Rust has a rich ecosystem of frameworks and libraries that let you read, parse, and manipulate text files, interact with cloud services and databases, and perform any other job that your project's development workflow may require. And because of its strong typing and tight memory management, you are much less likely to write programs that behave unexpectedly in production.

All the code discussed in this article can be accessed through this repository. For integration with existing projects consider using keyword_extraction crate available on crates.io.

So, be sure to double-check your critical libraries and be sure their alternatives exist in the Rust ecosystem. There’s a good chance the crates you need are available in Rust's crates.io repository.

The previous section was very simple, this section is also very simple but introduces us to cargo which is Rust's package manager, as a JS dev my mind goes straight to NPM.

Now, there has to be a place where all these packages come from. Similar to npmjs registry, where all node packages are registered, stored and retrieved, Rust also has something called crates.io where many helpful packages and dependencies are registered.

Before proceeding, let's check https://crates.io/, the official Rust package registry.

The most thrilling aspect has been the joy of writing the backend. It's like every struct, enum, and method in Rust forms this interconnected Multiverse of code , which you can see in crates.io which is best Documentation experience I Ever Had.

5. Crates.io

When using crates from eg. crates.io, and also things like std and core

Vendoring your packages was very tedious to even remotely get to work with Cargo. I spent a very long time getting Cargo to work together with cargo-local-registry. We vendor crates from crates.io and a custom internal registry.