Anyone interested in a tool helps to explore C++ ASTs
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I built this software to help users who need to do static code analysis for C/C++ codebase. This can help you to explore the ASTs interactively. It can replace the Clang ast dump completely and also you can search the code/ASTs in a structual way. For example you can search a function which matches specific name or number of paremeters.
HN · launched May 21, 2026 · 49 upvotes (top 16%) · 0 views
Niche: codebase visualization tools · 89 launches, 4 in the last 7 days ▼ -43% · Explore this niche →
Category and tags
- Horizontal
- Dev tools
- Developer
- Not AI
- Hobby / open-source project
Visit website ↗ Source listing ↗
More like this: all 89 launches in codebase visualization tools →
Could you build this?
Partial While an interactive GUI for viewing trees (using Qt or web views) can be vibecoded, integrating deeply with Clang's libTooling, handling complex compile_commands.json pipelines, and managing AST serialization/caching for real C++ codebases requires specialized compiler frontend knowledge.
What it would actually take: A production version requires a C++ backend interfacing with LLVM/Clang C++ APIs (specifically ASTContext, RecursiveASTVisitor, and Tooling), emitting serialized AST nodes and source range mappings to a Qt/QML or Electron GUI. The hard part is managing compiler diagnostic states, handling missing header configurations gracefully across non-trivial multi-platform build systems, and memory-efficient incremental AST caching for gigabyte-scale translation units.
Discussion
5 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: sem (Ataraxy-Labs/sem) - semantic entity extraction from tree-sitter ASTs, kythe - code indexing and cross-reference system, clang -Xclang -ast-dump - built-in AST dumping
Concerns raised: Compilation database only used for source discovery, lacks cross-translation unit analysis, Recompilation required when switching between source files, No cross-file search capability mentioned
Feature requests: Cross-file entity analysis leveraging Clang's richer AST, Pre-compile and cache ASTs to enable cross-file searching, Cross-translation unit analysis support
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one : 87 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #15 of 88 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 190 days after the earliest competitor.
- Sqry · hn · 2026-03-06 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.48
- A Satellite View for Python Code · hn · 2026-02-09 · 7 upvotes · similarity 0.44
- Structural code grep across public GitHub repositories · hn · 2026-08-22 · 15 upvotes · similarity 0.42
- Treepeat – Code similarity detection using Tree-sitter · hn · 2026-09-22 · 70 upvotes · similarity 0.42
- RepoPilot · ph · 2026-10-20 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.42
- C/C++ Cheatsheet · hn · 2026-01-23 · 10 upvotes · similarity 0.40
- GitBlast · ph · 2026-10-19 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.39
- I built a small browser engine from scratch in C++ · hn · 2026-01-28 · 146 upvotes · similarity 0.38
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