HackerReposA FIELD GUIDE TO OPEN SOURCE
ProSponsor the shelf♧ 0
← Back to top all-time
facebookarchive
pfff
OCaml2011–2025
facebookarchive / pfff · Archived

pfff

Tools for code analysis, visualizations, or style-preserving source transformation.

Explore on GitHubRead Hacker News discussions
25Distinct people
39Mentions
1Explicit recommenders
2.4KGitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

Tools for code analysis, visualizations, or style-preserving source transformation.

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use was verified in the last source check.

What people are saying

That's definitely a consideration, depending on your goals. For many language projects, I don't think you need more than one person for the front end. For libraries and code…

chubot used a recommendation phrase. One indexed comment matches. This is a phrase match, not a verdict.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 8–Nov 15 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/15/2026, 10:56:20 AM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year39 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2011-07-18 17:03:36 UTC to 2025-02-15 03:20:35 UTC.

02468102011-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2012-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 3 mentions; 1 submissions, 2 comments20112012-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 7 mentions; 3 submissions, 4 comments2013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 3 mentions; 0 submissions, 3 comments2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 5 mentions; 0 submissions, 5 comments2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 10 mentions; 1 submissions, 9 comments2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 1 submissions, 1 comments2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments20182019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 1 submissions, 1 comments2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2025

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20112011-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2012-01-01 00:00:00 UTC312
20122012-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC734
20132013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC303
20142014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC505
20152015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC1019
20162016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20172017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC211
20182018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20192019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202
20202020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20212021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC211
20222022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20232023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20242024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20252025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101

From the project README

An excerpt from the repository, fetched Nov 13, 2026.

Read the project’s introduction
pfff pfff is a set of tools and APIs to perform static analysis, code visualizations, code navigations, or style-preserving source-to-source transformations such as refactorings on source code. There is good support for C, Java, Javascript and PHP. There is also preliminary support for other languages such as C++, Rust, C#, Html, CSS, Erlang, Lisp, Haskell, Python, OPA and SQL. There is also very good support for OCaml code so that the framework can be used on the code of pfff itself. For each languages there are mainly 2 libraries, for instance parsing_php.cma and analysis_php.cma, that you can embed in your own application if you need to process PHP code. See the demos/ directory for example of use of the pfff API. See also docs/manual/Parsing_xxx.pdf and docs/manual/Analyzis_xxx.pdf for more documentation on how to use or extend pfff. pfff is also made of few tools: pfff, which allows to test the different parsers on a single file scheck, a bug finder stags, an Emacs tag generator sgrep, a syntactical grep spatch, a syntactical patch codemap, which is a gtk and cairo based source code visualizer/navigator/searcher leveraging the information computed previously by pfff_db and codegraph. codegraph, a source code indexer and package/module/class dependency visualizer codequery, an interactive tool a la SQL to query information about the structure of a codebase using Prolog as the query engine pfff_db, which does some global analysis on a set of source files and store the data in a marshalled form in a file somewhere (e.g. /tmp/db.json) For more information, look at the pfff wiki here: http://github.com/facebook/pfff/wiki/Main as well as the docs/manual/ directory. Usage for pfff: $ ./pfff -parse_php demos/foo.php or $ ./pfff -dump_php demos/foo.php You can also look at ./pfff --help Usage for pfff_db: $ ./pfff_db -lang ml -o /tmp/pfff.json ~/pfff to analyze all the .ml and .mli files under ~/pfff and store metadata information (the database) in /tmp/pfff.json Usage for codemap: $ ./codemap ~/pfff This should launch a gtk-based GUI that allows you to visualize source code and perform some code search. Usage for codegraph: $ ./codegraph -lang cmt -build ~/pfff to generate a graph_code.marshall file in ~/pfff containing all dependency information about the pfff codebase using the typed bytecode .cmt files generated during the compilation of pfff. $ ./codegraph ~/pfff This should launch a gtk-based GUI that allows you to visualize source code dependencies. More information Look at the pfff wiki here: http://github.com/facebook/pfff/wiki/Main
Read the full README on GitHub

What Hacker News says

7 sources
kmavm·Nov 22, 2012
Hey, I'm an engineer on the HipHop team, and a minor-league Haskell enthusiast. A couple clarifications: 1. HipHop is itself written in C++. While this did not logically need to be the case, it is the case. 2. These days our JIT compiler, the HipHop VM (hhvm) is out-performing the PHP-to-C++ ahead-of-time compiler. HHVM is under the HipHop umbrella, and so is also written in C++. If you're vaguely aware that Facebook has some sort of high-performance PHP execution engine, but have avoided investigation because compiling PHP sounds like a drag, check hhvm out; it is fast, and you use it the same way you use a PHP interpreter. 3. HipHop is not our entire PHP stack, however, and functional languages have a significant beachhead in static analysis. pfff (https://github.com/facebook/pfff) is a sophisticated multi-language analysis and transfor
Read the rest
mation framework written in OCaml. We use it for many, many purposes; e.g., at code review submission time, pfff symbolically executes the changed code to look for various dangerous idioms and highlight them as areas for the reviewer to focus attention. 4. There are other projects written in Haskell that, alas, we're not ready to talk intelligently about publicly. Watch this space, however. Overall, FP has a sizable presence at Facebook. Haskell's presence is a bit smaller than OCaml, though that might be changing. Facebook is definitely "using Haskell more these days," especially since Bryan O'Sullivan (author of "Real World Haskell") came aboard. I expect Simon Marlow will continue to influence things in that direction. From 100k feet, Facebook's adoption of Thrift, and Thrift's tradition of supporting polyglot languages, means that a lot of "niche" languages can flourish within the larger production ecosystem.
In Leaving Microsoft
wink·Nov 22, 2012
Please note that although the latest commits on [1] were 2 months ago, for a long while it hasn't been updated and/or usable to a decent degree. It seemed to have been deprecated in favor of [2] when the original author of lex-pass left Facebook. Sorry if any of this information is a little off/incomplete, I think it's been 2 years when I oversaw a BSc paper revolving around extending lex-pass. [1]: https://github.com/facebook/lex-pass [2]: https://github.com/facebook/pfff
In Leaving Microsoft

MAKE YOURSELF AT HOME

A few shortcuts

/
Search the collection
?
Open this guide
Esc
Close dialogs and navigation

Your saved repositories and interests stay in this browser.