forever now I've been imagining a codebase as database, functions/expressions are entries and the IDE can query based on context, eg. filter by regex or other rules and filter differently when debug context available etc.
it should be transparent once you flatten the db to file(s) and run normally, but for IDE would need to be aware of this db structure. maybe a VS code extension might work!
How is that not describing just a regular IDE like Intellij? The reason it has an indexing phase when you open a new project is because the IDE is building a database of your code base. You can then do many kinds of query against it.
They make IDEs for many languages but the indexability of languages varies a lot depending on (mostly) how strong their type system is and how easily parsed the code is. Check out their structured search feature for an example of how to do semantic queries over the indexed AST.
it should be transparent once you flatten the db to file(s) and run normally, but for IDE would need to be aware of this db structure. maybe a VS code extension might work!
that is the dream...