These ideological decisions don't sound very pragmatic. There's a <i>lot</i> of open-source prior art in this space (OpenGrok, Kythe, SourceGraph) which provide support for most large languages and have annotation output formats that are broadly similar to this JSON file, and you could still support users having indexers for small languages running as part of CI.<p>> There does not exist any widely available standalone C parsing library to provide C programs with access to an AST. There’s LLVM, but I have a deeply held belief that programming language compiler and introspection tooling should be implemented in the language itself. So, I set about to write a C parser from scratch.<p>Even if you prefer to write your C indexer in C, you could use LLVM's C [1] or Python [2] APIs. Plus, you can handle C++ without having to implement your own C++ parser from scratch, which is a much larger undertaking than C99 plus a few GNU extensions.<p>[1]: <a href="https://github.com/llvm-mirror/clang/blob/fb2a26cc2e40e007f19532b4e139d5f0a636d5c9/tools/c-index-test/c-index-test.c#L1956" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/llvm-mirror/clang/blob/fb2a26cc2e40e007f1...</a>
[2]: <a href="https://github.com/llvm-mirror/clang/blob/master/bindings/python/clang/cindex.py" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/llvm-mirror/clang/blob/master/bindings/py...</a>