Parser Features Documentation

Current Usage

Used Features

• ✅ imports - Used by LayerBoundaryValidator and BannedDependenciesValidator
• ✅ exports - Used by DependencyGraphBuilder to build module relationships

Reserved Features (Currently Unused)

• 📦 functions - Reserved for future semantic analysis
• 📦 classes - Reserved for future semantic analysis

Why Keep Unused Features?

The functions and classes fields in FileAnalysis are currently extracted but not used by any validators. They are intentionally kept for future enhancements:

Potential Future Features

1. Unused Export Detection

   • Detect exported functions/classes that are never imported
   • Help identify dead code

2. Complexity Analysis

   • Analyze function complexity (cyclomatic complexity)
   • Enforce maximum function length
   • Detect overly complex classes

3. Naming Convention Enforcement

   • Validate function/class naming patterns
   • Enforce consistent naming across layers

4. Semantic Dependency Analysis

   • Track which functions call which other functions
   • Detect circular dependencies at function level
   • Analyze coupling between classes

5. AI-Specific Rules

   • Detect when AI generates overly complex functions
   • Enforce simplicity constraints for AI-generated code

Performance Impact

The extraction of functions and classes has minimal performance impact:

• Parsing is already traversing the entire AST
• Extracting this data adds negligible overhead
• The data is small compared to the full AST

Decision

Keep and document rather than remove because:

• Low maintenance cost
• High potential future value
• Minimal performance impact
• Easier to keep than to re-add later