Except there are no free lunches, literally.
Parents still have to pay for part of the lunch.
I am currently writing a C compiler, with my own backend (and hopefully, frontend) in OCaml.
But why write your own C frontend? It's much more of a pain than people imagine. I maintain a C frontend implemented in OCaml (the project itself goes back 25 years) and it's still not on par with GCC or Clang.
For any other language, sure, but C has so many "wonderful" features, starting with the lexer hack. Your grammar conveniently overlooks this issue but it's something you'll have to deal with to actually implement it. So it simply won't be as nice as theory suggests.
These include semgrep, ast-grep, LLMs, and one-off scripts. After running these tools on a large code-base, you usually end up with lots of additional unintended changes. These range from formatting/whitespace to unrequested modifications by LLMs.
Maybe LLMs do, but why would semgrep or your one-off script be making unrelated changes?
This is like using sed
to replace something and using grep
to filter out the very things you just specifically modified.
It should be unnecessary if you commit frequently enough and don't do 10 different refactorings before starting to commit each one.
Assuming that it's just that person, that it's their actual name and that they're in the US...