Anyone interested in a tool helps to explore C++ ASTs
Details
- External ID
- 48228106
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- Anyone interested in a tool helps to explore C++ ASTs
- Website domain
- github.io
- Launched
- May 21, 2026
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 49
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.8376413570274637
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
Description
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.
Enrichment
- Theme
- markdown editors and writing tools
- Vertical
- Horizontal
- Function
- Dev tools
- Audience
- Developer
- AI stance
- Not AI
- Project type
- Hobby / open-source project
- Normalized one-liner
- c++ ast exploration tool
- Manually corrected
- False
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 — 48 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #11 of 49 (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 0.47
- A Satellite View for Python Code · hn · 2026-02-09 · 7 upvotes · similarity 0.43
- Structural code grep across public GitHub repositories · hn · 2026-08-22 · 15 upvotes · similarity 0.41
- Treepeat – Code similarity detection using Tree-sitter · hn · 2026-09-22 · 70 upvotes · similarity 0.41
- C/C++ Cheatsheet · hn · 2026-01-23 · 10 upvotes · similarity 0.39
- As Notes · hn · 2026-03-25 · 7 upvotes · similarity 0.38
- I built a small browser engine from scratch in C++ · hn · 2026-01-28 · 146 upvotes · similarity 0.37
- I built a Cargo-like build tool for C/C++ · hn · 2026-04-09 · 177 upvotes · similarity 0.37
Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.
Same idea, different domain
Nobody's really built a dev tools tool for Sales yet.