Issue #21795 has been updated by Eregon (Benoit Daloze). @mame What do you think about my idea to use start line/column + end line/column (or equivalently, start & end offsets)? AFAIK it solves all problems around this area, it's reliable, works across Prism versions, etc. We could even use `RubyVM::AbstractSyntaxTree` to get this line & column data on older Ruby versions, so it would work there too. Adding `Ruby::Node` seems not great to me, notably because it wouldn't be usable for gems needing to support anything older than Ruby 4.1. Also the `Ruby::Node` API would change without any control from the gem to say e.g. which major version of Prism it wants (well, it could use `required_ruby_version` but that seems very inconvenient for this purpose). With a dependency on the `prism` it lets Bundler resolve the version compatible with the various usages (or error if there isn't one). ---------------------------------------- Feature #21795: Methods for retrieving ASTs https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/21795#change-117010 * Author: kddnewton (Kevin Newton) * Status: Open ---------------------------------------- I would like to propose a handful of methods for retrieving ASTs from various objects that correspond to locations in code. This includes: * Proc#ast * Method#ast * UnboundMethod#ast * Thread::Backtrace::Location#ast * TracePoint#ast (on call/return events) The purpose of this is to make tooling easier to write and maintain. Specifically, this would be able to be used in irb, power_assert, error_highlight, and various other tools both in core and not that make use of source code. There have been many previous discussions of retrieving node_id, source_location, source, etc. All of these use cases are covered by returning the AST for some entity. In this case node_id becomes an implementation detail, invisible to the user. Source location can be derived from the information on the AST itself. Similarly, source can be derived from the AST. Internally, I do not think we have to store any more information than we already do (since we have node_id for the first four of these, it becomes rather trivial). For TracePoint we can have a larger discussion about it, but I think it should not be too much work. In terms of implementation, the only caveat I would put is that if the ISEQ were compiled through the old parser/compiler, this should return `nil`, as the node ids do not match up and we do not want to further propagate the RubyVM::AST API. The reason I am opening up this ticket with 5 different methods requested in it is to get approval first for the direction, then I can open individual tickets or just PRs for each method. I believe this feature would ease the maintenance burden of many core libraries, and unify otherwise disparate efforts to achieve the same thing. -- https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/