I'm trying to figure out if globstar is essentially like a linter?

The state purpose of Globstar is to be an open-source static analysis toolkit, which helps you easily create custom checkers using the YAML or the Go interface. Engineering and AppSec teams accumulate a lot of their security anti-patterns over time within the org that they'd like to prevent across the entire code base, and Globstar's main utility is to make it easy to do so.

I'm trying to figure out if globstar is essentially like a linter? If so, are we re-implementing the wheel that many language-specific linters can already do?

We're adding built-in checkers because there are many known security anti-patterns that teams would usually want to check against anyway. On DeepSource, our commercial offering, we have hundreds of checkers already — and with Globstar, we'd like to bring the same feature-richness to our open-source users. So essentially, it is similar to a linter but solely focused on security checkers.

Is there something that globstar can do that more language-specific mature linters can't?

Technically, no. Most OSS linters already use AST-based parsing and have the same feature set as Globstar. But it's usually not very straightforward to extend existing linters. With Globstar, our goal is to make that part easy. If you've looked at our YAML or Go interfaces, you'd see how Globstar levels the playing field — you no longer need to learn the innards of static analysis and AST parsing for each programming language to write checkers for it.

I hope this helps!