Cool project idea: organise/remove imports

[RazvanN]

On Thursday, 11 July 2024 at 10:28:35 UTC, Atila Neves wrote:
> It'd be amazing if one could hit a key/key combination and have 
> all imports pared down to the absolute minimum (and made 
> local). If only I had the time...
>
> Imagine being lazy, typing "import std;" at module-scope, 
> writing some code and... boom. "Hand-written" local imports 
> everywhere. One can dream.

I have a small program that uses dmd as a library that:

- identifies unused global imports
- provides a list of the symbols that are being used for each 
global import

It can easily be updated to also store the location for each of 
the usage sites for the imported symbols. By having the location 
you can approximate in what function you are in. That being said, 
it's not going to work with alias declarations and enums because 
those are eagerly substituted by the compiler when doing semantic 
analysis (the tool traverses the tree after sema was performed).

I think this small script can be used to at least automatically 
transform global imports into selective ones.

The fundamental problem with dmd as a library is that we still 
can't properly hook into the compiler internals. We are stuck to 
performing sema and then trying to extract information from the 
enriched tree, which kind of sucks.

RazvanN