Tracking: The Big Refactor

[zesterer]

I think it's clear that Ariadne has been successful in several domains, particularly the hobby langdev space. However, it has several limitations that a rewrite/refactor should address:

• No support for toggling colour on-and-off
• ANSI support is assumed, despite this assumption being unreasonable
• There are very few ways to customise the output (such as label ordering, for example)
• Terminal size can't be specified so label/note formatting is often broken

Additionally, there are some new features that a refactor could introduce:

• A generic DOM-like AST for reports (created using builder methods)
• More flexible structure with elements that can be arbitrarily nested
• Generic styling for elements
• Multiple backends (plaintext, ANSI, HTML, LSP JSON, etc.)

Comments welcome!

[CreatorSiSo]

I did a tiny test implementation to try out the user facing api:
https://github.com/CreatorSiSo/ariadne-next/blob/main/src/main.rs
and how a specific backend would be implemented:
https://github.com/CreatorSiSo/ariadne-next/blob/main/src/plaintext.rs

[CorvusPrudens]

At the very least, providing an AST would make it a lot easier to translate ariadne reports to HTML (if HTML isn't made a first-class backend target), which is a use case I'm very interested in! Any HTML implementation would likely be fairly opinionated, so an AST might even be preferable.

[calder]

One small thing that would be nice to fix: Cache::fetch returning references limits possible cache implementations (no RefCell for internally mutable caches for example).

[zesterer]

As a point of interest, I've made some initial headway into this on the ariadne2 branch. It's very early days, but it's already capable of showing some basic diagnostics.

[toadslop]

Keep up the good work! Looking forward to seeing the new release.