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semantic
Haskell2019–2025
github / semantic · Archived

semantic

Parsing, analyzing, and comparing source code across many languages

29Distinct people
36Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
9KGitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

Parsing, analyzing, and comparing source code across many languages

GitHub

Where it is used

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

What people are saying

No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.

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

Also in these discussions

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This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 11:56:56 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 year36 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2019-05-31 15:57:18 UTC to 2025-01-08 22:53:51 UTC.

0510152019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 13 mentions; 6 submissions, 7 comments20192020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 7 mentions; 0 submissions, 7 comments2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 8 mentions; 1 submissions, 7 comments2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments20222023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 6 mentions; 1 submissions, 5 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
20192019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC1367
20202020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC707
20212021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC817
20222022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20232023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC615
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
NOTE: This repository is no longer supported or updated by GitHub. If you wish to continue to develop this code yourself, we recommend you fork it. Semantic semantic is a Haskell library and command line tool for parsing, analyzing, and comparing source code. In a hurry? Check out our documentation of example uses for the semantic command line tool. Table of Contents Usage Language support Development Technology and architecture Licensing Usage Run semantic --help for complete list of up-to-date options. Parse Usage: semantic parse [--sexpression | (--json-symbols|--symbols) | --proto-symbols | --show | --quiet] [FILES...] Generate parse trees for path(s) Available options: --sexpression Output s-expression parse trees (default) --json-symbols,--symbols Output JSON symbol list --proto-symbols Output protobufs symbol list --show Output using the Show instance (debug only, format subject to change without notice) --quiet Don't produce output, but show timing stats -h,--help Show this help text Language support Language Parse AST Symbols† Stack graphs Ruby ✅ ✅ JavaScript ✅ ✅ TypeScript ✅ ✅ 🚧 Python ✅ ✅ 🚧 Go ✅ ✅ PHP ✅ ✅ Java 🚧 ✅ JSON ✅ ⬜️ ⬜️ JSX ✅ ✅ TSX ✅ ✅ CodeQL ✅ ✅ Haskell 🚧 🚧 † Used for code navigation on github.com. ✅ — Supported 🔶 — Partial support 🚧 — Under development ⬜ - N/A ️ Development semantic requires at least GHC 8.10.1 and Cabal 3.0. We strongly recommend using ghcup to sandbox GHC versions, as GHC packages installed through your OS's package manager may not install statically-linked versions of the GHC boot libraries. semantic currently builds only on Unix systems; users of other operating systems may wish to use the Docker images. We use cabal's Nix-style local builds for development. To get started quickly: git clone git@github.com:github/semantic.git cd semantic script/bootstrap cabal v2-build all cabal v2-run semantic:test cabal v2-run semantic:semantic -- --help You can also use the Bazel build system for development. To learn more about Bazel and why it might give you a better development experience, check the build documentation. git clone git@github.com:github/semantic.git cd semantic script/bootstrap-bazel bazel build //... stack as a build tool is not officially supported; there is unofficial stack.yaml support available, though we cannot make guarantees as to its stability. Technology and architecture Architecturally, semantic: Generates per-language Haskell syntax types based on tree-sitter grammar definitions. Reads blobs from a filesystem or provided via a protocol buffer request. Returns blobs or performs analysis. Renders output in one of many supported formats. Throughout its lifecycle, semantic has leveraged a number of interesting algorithms and techniques, including: Myers' algorithm (SES) as described in the paper An O(ND) Difference Algorithm and Its Variations RWS as described in the paper RWS-Diff: Flexible and Efficient Change Detection in Hierarchical Data. Open unions and data types à la carte. An implementation of Abstracting Definitional Interpreters extended to work with an à la carte representation of syntax terms. Contributions Contributions are welcome! Please see our contribution guidelines and our code of conduct for details on how to participate in our community. Licensing Semantic is licensed under the MIT license.
Read the full README on GitHub

What Hacker News says

36 sources
At Nuanced, we're building tools that make AI-generated code more reliable. As AI writes more code, we need better tools to trust it and technologies that ensure our human understanding keeps pace with this rapid development. While everyone else races to ship new features with AI, we're focused on addressing gaps in AI coding tools and ensuring those features are reliable and maintainable rather than code that works today but becomes a liability tomorrow. We're starting with an AI-powered Python language server that makes AI-generated code more reliable by understanding your entire system—using a deeper semantic understanding of code than LLMs have today, but also artifacts outside of code such as commit histories, configs, and team patterns. We're a team of ex-GitHub engineers and researchers who've scaled some of the world's largest dev
Read the rest
eloper platforms. I'm Ayman (https://www.aymannadeem.com/about/), and before founding Nuanced, I spent seven years at GitHub where I helped build Semantic(https://github.com/github/semantic), an open-source library for parsing and analyzing code across languages—and scaled security systems to detect anomalous code patterns across millions of repositories. Our team’s deep experience in static analysis and large-scale system design shapes our approach to the AI reliability challenge today. We've all been on-call at 2 AM, untangling complex service dependencies, and more recently, we've seen firsthand how AI accelerates development—both the wins and the wounds. If you're building an AI coding tool and any of this sounds interesting to you—we should talk! Read more at https://nuanced.dev/blog/the-reliability-gap
In Nuanced: As AI writes more code, we need better tools to trust it
I'm curious to see if Tree-sitter can be used to provide fast and rich code navigation. I was able to implement simple goto definition/references [1], not sure if it can be used for more advanced navigation features in a language-agnostic way. If you're interested, GitHub is already using it [2] for that purpose and Sourcegraph is experimenting it [3] [1] https://github.com/alidn/lsif-os [2] https://github.com/github/semantic [3] https://github.com/sourcegraph/sourcegraph/issues/17378
In Tree-sitter: an incremental parsing system for programming tools
I've been playing with some ideas for creating a SQLite database of classes, functions and suchlike found in Python code, so I can analyze my codebases with SQL queries. I've had some good initial results with https://github.com/davidhalter/jedi - which is the Python introspection library that powers various editor autocomplete implementations. I have a prototype which uses that to create a SQL database of functions, classes and places that they are used. I've also been playing with https://github.com/github/semantic - it can parse Python, JavaScript and other languages and offers a --json-symbols option which dumps out a JSON object showing the symbols (functions, variables etc) found in the code.
In The Database Inside Your Codebase

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