2. How to Extend

coastSHARK is currently more a proof of concept like tool than a fully thought through extensible tool. Therefore, the extendability is not as good as it could be.

Nevertheless, there are 2 ways in which coastSHARK can be extended.

The first would be adding new languages that can be parsed. This would require in its simplest form a pure python parser for the language and the AST node types that can be extracted with the parser. The AST node types are required as currently we are building a bag-of-words with AST nodes.

To add a new language parser would require adding it to util.extract_ast and including a call to it in smartshark_plugin.

The second second method by which coastSHARK could be extended is by extracting more complex AST information than a bag-of-words of the nodes, e.g., a tree representation of just additional information like class names.

This would also require changes in util.extract_ast for the implementation, in smartshark_plugin for the call and possibly in util.write_mongo to write this information to the database.