miniblog.

nREPL is a really interesting protocol for developer tools. It's extensible, but one of the basic operations is eval(). If your nREPL server doesn't support a given operation, you can just send an eval request to achieve the same result!

Counter-intuitively, if you're writing a parser for a programming language, you need it to be a total function. As soon as you build IDE tooling, you need ASTs from invalid or incomplete input. The parser should return (Ast, List<Error>) rather than Result<Ast, Error>.

I've been compilation buffers in Emacs recently and I really appreciate the error and warning counts shown in the modeline. I've added the equivalent feature to deadgrep: it shows result counts! Really useful when you're doing big refactorings.