AECforWebAssembly VS Lark

Great! I have not yet made source maps for my programming language that compiles to WebAssembly, and I probably never will.

Up until today, my AEC-to-WebAssembly was, if somebody tried to use two structures of different types as the second and the third operand to the ?: (ternary conditional) operator, as in this example: ``` Structure First Consists Of Nothing; EndStructure

Well, I have written the first compiler for my programming language, targetting x86, in IE6-compatible JavaScript, and the second compiler, targetting WebAssembly, has been written in C++11. I think that, to choose a language to write a compiler in, you need to look at at least two things:

You can see the releases v2.5.3 and v2.5.2 of AECforWebAssembly on GitHub. They are produced with the same version of GCC, the only difference (as far as I know) is that v2.5.2 was produced directly on Debian, whereas v2.5.3 was cross-compiled from Windows to Linux using Docker.

That could be true. I host my AEC-to-WebAssembly compiler on GitHub, GitLab and SourceForge, and it's only on GitHub that it has 21 stars and 2 forks. On GitLab and SourceForge, it has zero of both.

Well, the main compiler for my programming language is targetting the JavaScript Virtual Machine by outputting WebAssembly. I think it's even better than targetting Java Virtual Machine, because, for one thing, your executables can run in any modern browser if you output WebAssembly. If you target Java Virtual Machine, the users need to actually download your app. Furthermore, there is an official assembler for WebAssembly called WebAssembly Binary Toolkit (WABT), so your compiler can output assembly and not have to deal with binary files. There is nothing equivalent to that for Java Virtual Machine.

Lark supports, and recommends, writing and storing the grammar in a .lark file. We have syntax highlighting support in all major IDEs, and even in github itself. For example, here is Lark's built-in grammar for Python: https://github.com/lark-parser/lark/blob/master/lark/grammar...

You can also test grammars "live" in our online IDE: https://www.lark-parser.org/ide/

The rationale is that it's more terse and has less visual clutter than a DSL over Python, which makes it easier to read and write.

First, let me introduce myself. My name is Erez. You may know some of the Python libraries I wrote in the past: Lark, Preql and Data-diff.

It's not super maintained but you might enjoy building something with ppci, Pure Python Compiler Infrastructure. It has some front-ends and some back-ends. There's also PeachPy for an assembler. People like using Lark for parsing, I hear.

lark, a parsing library where I am somewhat involved has a really nice solution to this: Rules starting with _ are inlined in a post processing step.

Lark is a good library to assist with this.

If I may ask, did you consider Lark, and if so, why wasn't it fit for your purposes?

A grammar provides the high level constructs you need to define the "shape" of your data, and it largely takes care of the rest. Grammar libraries exist in other language (eg. lark or Parsimonius in Python) and they weren't created just to make XML parsing easier.

I made a solid attempt at an Earley parser framework of my own, but apparently to get the most reliable performance from Earley parsing you need to implement Joop Leo's improvement for right-recursive grammars, which nobody has been able to adequately explain to me. I've read Kegler's open letter to Vaillant, I've tried to read other implementations, I've even tried to beat my head against the original academic paper, but I don't have the background knowledge to make sense of it all.