pest VS rust-peg

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.

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

My peg crate is a parser generator that supports arbitrary token types as input. See https://github.com/kevinmehall/rust-peg/blob/master/tests/run-pass/tokens.rs for an example.

The one rust parser-generator I used is PEG

The two parser generators that I am aware of are lalrpop and PEG. There both great, and have seen some use by languages that have been written in Rust.

rust-peg

I wanted to create a parser for Apertium Stream. In 2014, I used Whittle in Ruby. If this year were 2001, I would use Lex/Yacc. Anyway, this year is 2021. I wanted to create this parser in Rust. I tried to find what is similar to Lex/Yacc. I found Rust-Peg. I found a link to Nom from Rust-Peg's document. My first impression was Nom example is easy to read. At least, its document claimed Nom is fast.

The peg crate has a resolved issue about this.

I don't really know that much about parsing and grammars, other than what I've learned about regular languages and expressions and context-free languages in a standard Theory of Comp course from my university. I basically just learned peg by reading the Wikipedia article on PEGs, reading the crate documentation to understand the syntax, and then looking at some of the peg examples on their GitHub to understand how it works in practice.