aowllens

A NIF lens for tooling, in nimony — the nimony port of the (Nim 2) aiflens. A thin CLI over Nimony's own NIF libraries that reads nimcache/*.nif artifacts with the real parser and emits compact JSON for a host tool (e.g. aowllsp, the aowl-code plugin) to consume.

Because it links the compiler's NIF libraries (nifprelude / nifstreams / symparser / nifindexes), its line-info decoding, symbol handling and tag vocabulary always match the toolchain that produced the file, and it tracks NIF format bumps for free — no regex approximation.

Why nimony? The whole aowl stack is nimony-native and JS-compilable. The Nim-2 aiflens shelled out from a Nim-2 process; aowllens is nimony, so the same NIF-reading logic can eventually run in-process inside a nimony tool (or a browser IDE) instead of as a subprocess.

Subcommands

aowllens decls   <file.s.nif> [symbol]   declaration sites {sym,name,kind,file,line,col}
aowllens render  <file.nif>   [needle]    pseudo-Nim rendering of top-level nodes
aowllens index   <file>                   interface index (.s.idx.nif): checksum/exports/converters
aowllens outline <file>                   top-level named nodes (names only)
aowllens query   <file> <needle>          subtrees whose tag or symbol matches
aowllens serve                            line-oriented stdio daemon (one JSON req/resp per line)
aowllens version

Faithful to aiflens

tests/difftest.sh generates a real .s.nif with nimony check and compares every command against the Nim-2 aiflens it replaces:

• decls, outline, query, index — byte-identical.
• render — identical modulo the hex-case of \u00XX escapes for control-character literals in the heuristic pretty-printer (aiflens is itself inconsistent there; aowllens is consistent lowercase, matching std/json).

Build

bash build.sh          # -> bin/aowllens
bash tests/difftest.sh # differential test vs aiflens

Links Nimony's NIF libraries from $NIMONY_SRC (default $HOME/nimony/src) and the shared aowlkit lib (json).

Layout

file	role
src/aowllens.nim	CLI entry + dispatch
src/aowllenspkg/core.nim	NIF loading + shared helpers (JSON via aowlkit)
src/aowllenspkg/decls.nim	declaration sites
src/aowllenspkg/outline.nim	outline + query
src/aowllenspkg/index.nim	interface index reading
src/aowllenspkg/render.nim	NIF → pseudo-Nim renderer
src/aowllenspkg/serve.nim	stdio daemon