ReX VS pest

I'm not sure if it counts since the author's repo doesn't compile on a current rustc, and the last update was more than a year ago, but there's ReX, a program for typesetting mathematics in pure Rust. grapheia's fork seems more active though, and last time I checked it did compile.

And some related parser tools: - https://github.com/kevinmehall/rust-peg - https://github.com/pest-parser/pest - https://github.com/lalrpop/lalrpop

I had recently completed the first year of my Computer Science class at school and will begin my second year soon. My schools' class forces the use of Java programming language, and I absolutely hated it. So, over the course of a little less than a month, I wrote my own programming language, in Rust (objectively best programming language), using pest, to be as similar to Rust as possible, but compiling to Java.

I second pest.rs. Using it is fairly intuitive and there's also a live playground on their website which is great for quickly developing and testing your AST (abstract syntax tree) parser for whatever language you're implementing.

This is where you'll run into trouble. People who write parsing-related Rust crates generally write things like pest that expect their syntax to be defined completely at compile time so the parser can be run through the compiler's optimizers for best performance.

Give https://pest.rs a try.

For now I have used pest to generate an AST that borrows from the given input. But if I can manage to make the parser generic over the return type it may be worth a refactoring.