lalrpop VS PEGTL

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

lalrpop

Rust is a very nice langage for implementing compilers, and has a nice ecosystem for it (logos, rust-peg, lalrpop, astmaker -- this one is mine --, etc...).

rust-langdev has a lot of libraries for building compilers in Rust. Perhaps you could use these to make your implementation easier, and revisit it later if you want to build things from scratch. I'd suggest logos for lexing, LALRPOP / chumsky for parsing, and rust-gc for garbage collection.

Hi! For one of my projects I am currently using lalrpop (https://github.com/lalrpop/lalrpop/tree/master/doc/calculator/src), which is far from complete, but has the basic syntax I was looking for. I took some examples and worked around some lexer stuff but I’m currently happy with it. If you use it and have Intellij stuff installed, you can also use a plug-in for highlighting and SOMETIMES error checking. Otherwise, even VSCode had a great plug-in for highlighting!

How would you compare and contrast this with, say, lalrpop?

lalrpop is great. It's a completely different approach from nom, but for parsing a programming language, I would at least consider it. RustPython uses it.

I presume LALRPOP handles left recursion just fine.

I wanted to share an experimental side project I have been working on for some time. I constantly use commands like `jq` and `yq` for processing structured data in my day job and I was curious if a similar idea could be applied to images.

Another goal of mine was to get some exposure to with rust. I discovered the LALRPOP parser generator which really helped moved the project along (https://github.com/lalrpop/lalrpop)

The key point here is that we are going to depend on the lalrpop library to generate the parser based on the formal grammar we define. Note that we have it as part of the [build-dependencies] section and we only depend on a tiny utility crate called lalrpop-util at runtime. The reason for that is the main lalrpop "magic" would happen during the crate compilation (in the build.rs file) when lalrpop would generate the deterministic pushdown automaton based on our grammar. The code generation logic is not required to be part of our interpreter, we only need a few utility methods from the lalrpop-util for the automaton to operate. You might have noticed that we also enable the lexer feature of lalrpop, because we are going to use lexer provided by lalrpop as well (please refer to the Part I if you do not know what the lexer is).

Very cool, and I like the name!

I'd be interested in reading about how Matcheroni compares with PEGTL and Lexy.

https://github.com/taocpp/PEGTL

I found a library I wanted to test: Pegtl

I like PEGTL

Sure - libraries that are expected to be entirely self-contained. The one that comes to mind is PEGTL, a parser combinator library that is intended to be embedded inside a larger program. Making it import more dependencies would break this philosophy. Similarly, in the Rust world, there are a variety of "no-std" crates that should be able to be imported even if the standard library is not available on the target platform.

The program in the post was just an example meant to illustrate the problem. Originally, this (new) behavior of MSVC broke my code in the PEGTL, see [this commit](https://github.com/taocpp/PEGTL/commit/e3c8cb499dc3d1d76d23f2d5d79469dcb15550c5) that I needed to apply to fix it.

As a professional C++ programmer I feel a lot of the reasons C++ gets this response is because it's simply not "batteries included" like Go or Rust.

C++ is a very powerful, unopinionated language, that gives you a lot of freedom to attack your problem domain the way you best see fit.

If you're writing a networked application, don't use POSIX sockets, go and find a higher level library. If you're parsing complex text formats, don't iterate over buffers with char*'s, go pick up PEGTL[0]. If you're working on graphs, or need to properly index in-memory data, go pick up Boost[1][2]. If you need a GUI, go pick up Qt.

It's extremely common in C++, due to the lack of a universal package management solution, for people to try and "muddle through" and do shit themselves when it's far outside their core competency.

At one of my last employers, the core product was parsing JSON with std::regex, simply because they couldn't be bothered to integrate a JSON library.

[0] https://github.com/taocpp/PEGTL

[1] https://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_76_0/libs/graph/

[2] https://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_76_0/libs/multi_index/doc/i...

You are looking for Boost.Spirit (https://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_76_0/libs/spirit/doc/x3/html/index.html) or PEGTL (https://github.com/taocpp/PEGTL)

I personally prefer to use parsing combinator libraries in C++, where the "grammar" is just part of normal C++ and directly integrate. Examples are Boost.Spirit, pegtl, or (my own) lexy.

While I'm not quite sure how this might transfer to your approach, with your Haskell-inspired style being quite different from our C++ templates, in the PEGTL our equivalent to your Char, which is called one, is variadic (true to the T in PEGTL a variadic template) and takes a list of possible matches.