rpds VS pest

Another option I can think of - but not completely sure how one would implement in Rust - would be to never mutate the shared state, but rather when updating it - completely swapping it out with a completely new copy of the desired state. There's lots of different ways to go about doing this - each with their own trade offs. But using some form of Persistent Data Structure would probably be a good way to start. If you only have a single writer - then I believe using a Cell and simply updating which version of the structure is being read could work. rpds seems to be a decent start to look at these sorts of structures in Rust.

Thanks for taking the time to provide a detailed response. Need to think on this. I had actually started a regular Clojure parser using LLVM as a hobby, but then my friend said it was better to implement this in a safe-memory and. save-concurrency language like Rust and leverage cranelift for code generation. So, now I am learning rust, lol. (Btw, Rust has a persistent data structures lib too: https://github.com/orium/rpds )

Take a look at https://github.com/orium/rpds or one of the many others.

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.