combine VS pest

Combine is also nice to use and actively developed.

https://crates.io/crates/combine is a decent alternative to Nom. I found it much easier to pick up. I was using it to implement our generalized placeholder syntax in SQLx (which I hope to actually finish at some point): https://github.com/launchbadge/sqlx/blob/a2eda2de2462876a160982e57d73103795e34aa2/sqlx-core/src/placeholders.rs

Nice to see support for error recovery with parser combinators! I never got to the point of adding it in combine as I swapped out my language parser(s) to use LALRPOP instead (implementing error recovery for it instead).

You may want to also look at some of the popular parser combinators like nom and combine. I don't think they do what you are suggesting, though.

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.