[ruby-core:88432] [Ruby trunk Feature#14844] Future of RubyVM::AST?

[bozhidar@batsov.com]

Issue #14844 has been updated by bozhidar (Bozhidar Batsov).


I'm really curious what's the purpose of this module and why wasn't in developed in collaboration with the maintainers of libraries like https://github.com/whitequark/parser and https://github.com/whitequark/ast, and the maintainers of prominent AST-based tools (e.g. https://github.com/rubocop-hq/rubocop)? 

Seems to me really misguided to developed a module like this one without really discussing its design with any of its potential users and to quietly just ship it with Ruby 2.6.

That has been beyond frustrating for a very long time - a handful of people sit together somewhere and make all the shots, with the feedback from everyone often simply ignored. For any library to become really useful one should look at the problems people would normally be solving using it. 

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Feature #14844: Future of RubyVM::AST? 
https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/14844#change-73487

* Author: rmosolgo (Robert Mosolgo)
* Status: Open
* Priority: Normal
* Assignee: 
* Target version: 
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Hi! Thanks for all your great work on the Ruby language. 

I saw the new RubyVM::AST module in 2.6.0-preview2 and I quickly went to try it out. 

I'd love to have a well-documented, user-friendly way to parse and manipulate Ruby code using the Ruby standard library, so I'm pretty excited to try it out. (I've been trying to learn Ripper recently, too: https://ripper-preview.herokuapp.com/, https://rmosolgo.github.io/ripper_events/ .)

Based on my exploration, I opened a small PR on GitHub with some documentation: https://github.com/ruby/ruby/pull/1888

I'm curious though, are there future plans for this module? For example, we might: 

- Add more details about each node (for example, we could expose the names of identifiers and operators through the node classes)
- Document each node type 

I see there is a lot more information in the C structures that we could expose, and I'm interested to help out if it's valuable. What do you think? 



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