The pattern matcher walked collections through INode.Role/FirstChild/
NextSibling, skipping siblings of a different role. Now that each
AstNodeCollection<T> is already the per-role child list, the engine matches two
collections by list index, and INode sheds Role/FirstChild/NextSibling
entirely. A collection exposes its IReadOnlyList<INode> view through a cached
adapter rather than implementing the interface directly, so a typed collection
does not become ambiguous for LINQ. Characterization tests pin the matcher's
behavior first.
Assisted-by: Claude:claude-opus-4-8:Claude Code
Children were kept in a per-node doubly-linked list with the slot accessors
layered over it as a view. Storage now is the slot model: each node stores its
children in generated backing fields, AstNodeCollection<T> is backed by a
List<T>, and the flattened child-index space is owned by generated
GetChildCount/GetChild/SetChild/GetChildSlot members, with sibling navigation,
the role API and Clone re-expressed over them and indices renumbered lazily. A
DEBUG CheckInvariant runs after each transform, the analog of the IL
pipeline's per-transform check, so a transform that corrupts the tree fails at
that transform. Output is unchanged.
Assisted-by: Claude:claude-opus-4-8:Claude Code
Each child of a C# AST node is declared as a [Slot] partial property, and the
source generator emits the accessor bodies and an ordered slot schema
(SlotCount/GetSlotRole/IsCollectionSlot) from them. Generating the schema
keeps slot order from being mis-stated by hand and lets a DEBUG invariant
check declared slot order against document order on every decompile. The node
hierarchy is converted family by family; the EntityDeclaration leaves flatten
their inherited Attributes/ReturnType/NameToken into each leaf's ordered slot
set. Storage stays the NRefactory linked list at this stage, so only the
declaration model changes and output is unchanged.
Assisted-by: Claude:claude-opus-4-8:Claude Code
Introduce a Roslyn source generator that emits the visitor boilerplate for
the C# AST from [DecompilerAstNode]-tagged node declarations: the
IAstVisitor interface, the AcceptVisitor overloads, the pattern-placeholder
nodes, and the initial DoMatch support. AccessorKind lets an accessor's
keyword be chosen independently of its role, an early step toward shedding
the NRefactory role model.
Siegfried Pammer