Why I Chose Regex Over AST Parsing in My SAST Tool (And When That Would Be Wrong)

In my last article, I mentioned that my SAST tool uses regex-based pattern matching instead of AST parsing, and that this was a deliberate tradeoff. A few people asked me to go deeper on that decision — because on the surface, it sounds like I took a shortcut. I didn't. Or rather — I did, but it was