nom VS pest

Unlike the previous parser, which was based on the nom parser-combinator library, the new parser is an optimised recursive descent parser with a separate lexing step. This change allows for more efficient parsing by separating the tokenisation of the input from the parsing logic itself, streamlining the parsing process.

Just in case you are not familiar with nom, it is a parser combinator written in Rust. The most basic thing you can do with it is import one of its parsing functions, give it some byte or string input and then get a Result as output with the parsed value and the rest of the input or an error if the parser failed. tag for example is used to recognize literal character/byte sequences.

I may be the only one not familiar, but nom refers to https://github.com/rust-bakery/nom which looks like a pretty handy way to parse binary data in Rust.

Lots of people use nom for their parsing needs, but that's not the only game in town and there other options.

As much as I love nom as well as other parser combinator libraries, regex-based parsers, BNF/EBNF-based parsers, etc. I always end up going back to plain old text-based char-by-char scanners.

I am using nom / nom_locate to build the parser side because I've done a handful of other projects with it, and I plan to use tower-lsp to hook up the language server side.

Look into a parsing library such as https://github.com/rust-bakery/nom

If we were in /r/learnrust I'd have recommended the nom crate for this.

Thanks to the flexibility of [nom](https://github.com/rust-bakery/nom), it is very easy to write your own parser in rust, read [this article](https://github.com/metaworm/luac-parser-rs/wiki/Write-custom-luac-parser) to learn how to write a luac parser

Nice work. Out of curiosity, did you consider using pest (https://pest.rs/) to help build your parser? Or is it too much for what you are doing?

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.