- Work via static analysis
- Accept invalid/partial source
- Provide an open interface (observer to IDE source changes, etc., but not be impossible to hook up to a command line interface for other static analysis uses)
- Be reasonably performant (whatever that means)
It will likely be demand driven and constraints based.
It will likely be written in Java with the intent of integrating to RDT (see Summer of Code work), with experiments in Ruby.
This (hacking algorithms in both Ruby and Java) may be made easier by using an ANTLR grammar now that ANTLR3 can target Ruby as well as Java. The Rubyfront/XRuby grammar is a great candidate.
Alternatively, parse.y is viable through Jay and/or Racc.