Code/Mod/Lang/Multi

• Polyglot Codemod Engines

  • ChatGPT/Response
    • Tools that call themselves language-agnostic codemod engines (often marketed as “polyglot” or “structural search-and-rewrite” frameworks) sit on top of parsers like Tree-sitter and give you one DSL to query / rewrite many languages. Besides OpenRewrite, the main players are:

    • Engine	Core idea	Out-of-the-box languages*
      Grit (GritQL)	SQL-ish query language + declarative rewrites, SaaS & CLI	JS/TS, Python, Go, Rust, Java, Terraform, SQL, CSS, Markdown, YAML, … 12+ GitHubElite AI Tools
      Comby	Lightweight templates → structural search/replace; no per-lang boilerplate	“~every language” via heuristics + specific parsers comby.devcomby.dev
      AST-grep	Tree-sitter-based grep/replace with intuitive code-as-pattern DSL	30+ TS grammars; add your own quickly GitHub
      Semgrep + Autofix	Pattern-matching rules with optional fix: block; same rule file works across all supported parsers	35+ languages (C, Python, Swift, Kotlin, etc.) Semgrep
      Codemod.com Studio	AI-assisted UI that emits deterministic AST-grep scripts	same list as AST-grep (it’s the engine under the hood) codemod.comdocs.codemod.com
      GitHub CodeQL Autofix	Semantic security queries + LLM-generated fixes; polyglot IR	C/C++, C#, JS/TS, Java, Kotlin, Python, Ruby, Swift (growing) The GitHub BlogThe GitHub Blog
      Code Property Graph (CPG)	Graph DB over AST+CFG; you can write traversal scripts that mutate code	multi-language IR, research/enterprise focus GitHub

      • *Engines inherit new languages whenever Tree-sitter (or an equivalent parser) adds one, so coverage keeps expanding.

    • Other honorable mentions

      • Tree-sitter query + rewrite prototypes – experimental; you write a matcher and feed edits back to the tree. Good for bespoke tasks but no turnkey CLI. Tree-sitter
      • OpenRewrite – the widest JVM/ecosystem coverage plus YAML “recipes,” but outside JVM it only touches config formats (YAML/JSON/HCL). OpenRewrite Docs
      • CLI SSR built into IDEs – VS Code / IntelliJ structural replace; handy but not scriptable at repo scale. Tabnine