s2prot VS nom

SC2 replays are MPQ files, which is a proprietary format created and used by Blizzard. It's an archive that may contain multiple files stored with different compression and optionally encrypted. I wrote a lib to parse MPQ files that embodies SC2Replays: https://github.com/icza/mpq. I also wrote an SC2 replay parser that is more or less a port of the official s2protocol: https://github.com/icza/s2prot

vm = virtual machine/memory?

I'm porting this Python library to Rust: https://github.com/Blizzard/s2protocol.

For the shitty, first pass prototype code I've written so far I've seen a ~30-40x speedup compared to the Python implementation and a ~2x speedup compared to a Go implementation by someone else: https://github.com/icza/s2prot.

That is why I chose Rust over a GC language like Go. It's a lot faster out of the box, even without me having a strong understanding of memory operations.

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

I've been working on an assembler and right now it uses nom. While nom isn't great for error messages, good error messages will be important for this particular assembler (current code), so I've been attempting to use the methods described by Eyal Kalderon in Error recovery with parser combinators (using nom).