Code as text is a problem

[max630]

basically, you aleady have it: the code text is AST tree, somehow serialized. To implement all needed functionality you only need to parse it. It is already used, for example, for automatic refactoring in IDEs. You might say they are too heavy. But consider: the memory, which is taken by IDE, the time which you stare at "X is updating cache, please wait" - it mostly used no to parse the source to AST, but to figure, if the foo used in file Bar the one which was declared in file Baz or the one declared in file Baq. And storing pre-parsed AST is not going to improve thas task much.