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Flyparse-mode is an emacs minor-mode designed to support the creation of programming-language major-modes.
Flyparse uses external parsers to generate s-expression ASTs for language files, as they are being edited. Language modes are then able to query these ASTs using a declarative search syntax.

Features:

• Pluggable architecture. It doesn’t matter how you implement the parser, as long as it supports the flyparse protocol.

• Simple and unobtrusive. Can be used to compliment an existing language mode.

• Provides an intuitive query language for accessing the parse-trees. For example, to get a list of all javascript function names in a file, you might say: (flyparse-query-all ’(“PROGRAM” “FUNCTION_DECLARATION” “FUNCTION_NAME” “IDENT”)).

• Supports cross-file queries; it’s very simple to implement a ‘jump to definition’ helper.

• Provides helper functions to pretty-print a buffer’s syntax tree or to overlay a shaded depth representation over the buffer (see images below).

• Includes parsers for javascript, css and actionscript 3.

• Allows for the creation of robust, readable language helpers.

Pictures are a lot more fun, so here’s some eye-candy. First off, prototype.js (that’s *3000*+ lines of hairy javascript) – flyparse is currently able to parse and load this AST in about 2 seconds (remember, emacs is not blocked):

Here’s the parse tree – pretty printed:

And here’s a colorized visualization of the code structure: