Can argot deal with big pascal project?

[fredvs]

The problem

Can Argot handle a large-scale Pascal project like https://github.com/mse-org/mseide-msegui?

I tried adding a Wayland target (MSEgui currently uses gdi32 for Windows and X11 for Unix) with Gemini AI, but it cost me many sleepless nights and I had to constantly fix it (it often confused C syntax with Pascal syntax).
Ultimately, it didn't work at all.

The fpGUI project now supports Wayland. Andrew implemented it with Claude's help. graemeg/fpGUI#193

It use the Pascal Wayland binding of Andrews from there: https://github.com/andrewd207/wayland-pascal/tree/main

PS: Maybe enable the "Discussion" feature of Github: in [Settings] [General] [Features] [Discussions]

Proposed solution

Deal big Pascal project.

Alternatives considered

No response

[damienmeur]

Hi Fred, sorry for the slow reply. I ended up spending a few days on MSEgui because it turned out to be a much more interesting test case than I expected.

The short answer is yes.

In fact, MSEgui exposed a couple of bugs in Argot's Pascal parser, so I ended up fixing those first. Thanks for pointing me in that direction. 🙂

I ran Argot on the whole project (around 500k lines of usable not vendor Pascal) and it handled it without any issue. A full fit takes about 90 seconds on my M3 Pro (to compute the MSEGui voice once at setup and every 100-ish PRs to refit the voice), then day-to-day checks only look at the diff, so they're usually just a few ms.

I put everything in a fork if you'd like to have a look:

https://github.com/damienmeur/mseide-msegui

In particular:

• Setup: Added argot voice-model setup: corpus scope and fitted snapshot damienmeur/mseide-msegui#3
• Regular argot rules violations on MSEgui that could be caught: DO NOT MERGE: deliberate argot violations for an end-to-end CI test damienmeur/mseide-msegui#5
• Wayland consistency rule: Added an argot rule guarding the gui backend contract (answers argot#312) damienmeur/mseide-msegui#6
• Examples of wayland consistency rules violation caught: DO NOT MERGE: what argot catches on a Wayland backend (demo for argot#312) damienmeur/mseide-msegui#8

I don't think Argot replaces the compiler or the Wayland bindings. Where I think it helps is keeping a large implementation consistent while you're iterating with AI: catching missing functions, naming mismatches, forgotten implementations, and similar issues that are easy to overlook on a project of that size.

The wayland scenario is a very interresting use case that made Argot improved a lot over the few last days.

I could of course help you do the setup and help you more with this particular issue, but I totally understand that integrating a fresh new tool in a repo such as MSEGui is not an easy decision, so I wont push it.

And thanks for the suggestion about GitHub Discussions, I enabled it.

[fredvs]

Hello Damien.

Great job! I'll study it carefully.

Perhaps you could turn this issue into a discussion (at the bottom right of the page, click on "Turn into discussion")?

I'll write to you later, once I've read and understood your work.