benjamn / benjamn/recast

empty node type for easy composition

Open
#121 2 comments 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub
enhancement
Dominant language
TypeScript
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Forks
363
Avg merge
3d 8h
Merged PRs (30d)
3

Description

I often find myself wanting to conditionally add a node to a list when building an AST. For example when building the argument list for a `b.callExpression`. Currently the way to do it is to pull out the args array and conditionally push something to it and then pass it to the builder function. It'd be nice to have an empty node type that recast can ignore.

```
b.callExpression(
fun,
[
a,
b,
condition ? b.literal(c) : b.empty()
]
);
```

This will also make `.map`ing over nodes much easier.

Contributor guide

No contributing guide indexed for this repository

Research direction

Start by tracing the builder entry points shown in the example, especially b.callExpression and the proposed b.empty(), and inspect how recast processes nodes in lists. Done means an empty node can be returned from conditional expressions or mapped lists and is ignored during output without requiring manual array edits.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
typescript
Domain
compilers
Issue type
Feature
Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Mostly clear
Newbie friendliness
25/100

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