stack-graphs

One of the most interesting approaches to code search I've seen recently (no affiliation) https://github.com/pyjarrett/septum The hardest part about getting code search right imo is grabbing the right amount of surrounding context, which septum is aimed at solving on a per-file basis. Another one I'm surprised hasn't been mentioned is stack-graphs (https://github.com/github/stack-graphs), which tries to incrementally resolve symbolic relationships across the whole codebase. It powers github's cross-file precise indexing and conceptually makes a lot of sense, though I've struggled to get the open source version to work

This is exactly right. You either end up with something very low-level (on the level of LLVM IR, for instance)—which means you aren't constructing and analyzing high-level language constructs anymore—or with something high-level but with many language-specific special cases grafted on. Where we've found success is in stepping back and creating formalisms that are language-agnostic to begin with, and then using tree-sitter to manage the language-specific translations into that formalism. A good example is how we use stack graphs for precise code navigation [1], which uses a graph structure to encode a language's name binding semantics, and which we build up for several languages from tree-sitter parse trees [2]. [1] https://dcreager.net/talks/stack-graphs/ [2] https://github.com/github/stack-graphs/tree/main/languages