pest VS chumsky

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.

I attempted to use this but was disheartened but the fact that it doesn't statically type node names. Tree Sitter doesn't either but it has much more of an excuse given that it targets C.

https://github.com/lezer-parser/lezer/issues/8

The dev seems mildly hostile to outside involvement too, so I moved on. These days I use Chumsky which is Rust rather than Typescript, but also way more awesome, if you can deal with the often incomprehensible compilation errors at least!

https://github.com/zesterer/chumsky

there’s also chumsky: https://github.com/zesterer/chumsky

We are using technique called parser combinator. And we are using a library chumsky to write parser combinators.

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.

The examples that come with chumsky and the chumsky tutorial and guide all define their parsers using closures.

Parser: https://crates.io/crates/chumsky

chumsky's zero-copy rewrite has reached its first alpha release, and I have migrated my pep-508 parser to it, as suggested in my last announcement.

On my side, nom is still advancing well and a new major version is in preparation, with some interesting work a new GAT based design inspired from the awesome work on chumsky, that promises to bring great performance with complex error types. 2023 will be fun for parser libraries!

I am using chumsky because I like the API, but it doesn't support zero copy at the moment. Although efficiency is good to have, it is not my primary good. This will probably get supported once chumsky implements support for it (see upstream issue).

Checkout https://github.com/zesterer/chumsky or https://github.com/rust-bakery/nom