synth VS lalrpop

SEEKING FREELANCER | London | Remote

Synth (YC S20) [1] is an open source declarative data generator written 100% in Rust.

We are looking for someone with prior experience writing Rust in production for a 1-to-3 months contract to work with us on our core open-source project.

- Proven experience writing production Rust code, preferably in a large code base

- Knowledge of PostgreSQL at a level sufficient to design and build reliable integration

- Strong knowledge of data structures and algorithms

- Track record of contribution to open-source projects, preferably on GitHub

- Ability to work quickly and rigorously in a fully remote setting

If that sounds interesting, we want to talk to you! Shoot me an email at damien [at] getsynth.com!

[1]: https://github.com/getsynth/synth

Synth | Rust Software Engineer | Full Time or Part Time | London | Onsite(London)/Remote

About us: Synth is an open source declarative data generator (https://github.com/getsynth/synth). We are building Synth with the intention of solving, once and for all, the problem of generating realistic data for testing - helping big companies and small developers avoid the use of production data in testing.

Our mission is to build amazing developer tools that solve data privacy without forcing users to compromise on productivity. We have a few exciting products in our pipeline and we're backed by YCombinator and other great investors. We're based in London and building a remote-friendly culture.

We work exclusively on open source software. This is great because our community is not confined to just our core team and the users, but also includes our contributors - we believe it is way more fun this way.

We're using Rust for our main line of products - and what we would like to see ideally is:

* You have some experience with Rust that has connected you with at least one of: asynchronous I/O, meta-programming or common patterns for concurrency. Having been involved in an open-source Rust project is a bonus!

Take a look at this rust library (which works very well with python modules which generate data in certain formats): https://github.com/getsynth/synth

Putting the finishing touches on a procedural macro to bind Rust code to koto we want to use in synth. Also a blog post about it is on the way.

I'm working on synth https://github.com/getsynth/synth . Also working on a personal project, implementing the tcp protocol in Rust for the fun of it.

We use Rust to build synth, the open source declarative data generator.

Hey HN! We're Synth - a bunch of engineers out of Europe building tooling for developers. We're very excited about what we're working on and wanted to share it with the community.

We've been quite frustrated with the status quo of test data generation - after speaking to tons of other devs we've realised that many people are struggling when it comes to generating realistic looking test data.

Also, where people don’t want to copy sensitive production data to testing environments, data obfuscation can be a huge time-sink.

Enter Synth: a declarative data generator (see our website: https://getsynth.com/, github: https://github.com/getsynth/synth)

Synth enables devs and dev teams to have their application data models as code (basically a hierarchy of files) in their repos. These files can then be used to generate data for a local dev environment, automated testing in CI or even for sharing across organisations. The parameters of generation can also be tweaked to push the data model to its limits for QA, and even scaled for load testing / performance testing.

We're now working on taking the next step, and building a DSL around Synth. The Synth DSL will enable users to concisely define what data should look like and get going.

We're open source and written 100% in Rust. We believe that by making test data be as easy as using production data, we can improve the security and privacy for all of us. We'd love to get more early users as the initial feedback is positive but limited.

Thank you and looking forward to any feedback / ideas about how we can build a better tool for you!

P.S. Synth [launched on HN a while back](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24198114) as an ML solution to create realistic (and safe) copies of your sensitive production data as a service. This approach quickly hit several limitations which couldn't address the use-cases we are trying to solve, happy to go into more details on this if anyone is interested.

I'm currently trying to improve the vtable dispatch in koto (because I want to use it in synth).

Luckily, not all Rust jobs are crypto jobs. I'm in my third Rust job working on synth right now and am 100% happy with it.

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

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.

Hi! For one of my projects I am currently using lalrpop (https://github.com/lalrpop/lalrpop/tree/master/doc/calculator/src), which is far from complete, but has the basic syntax I was looking for. I took some examples and worked around some lexer stuff but I’m currently happy with it. If you use it and have Intellij stuff installed, you can also use a plug-in for highlighting and SOMETIMES error checking. Otherwise, even VSCode had a great plug-in for highlighting!

How would you compare and contrast this with, say, lalrpop?

lalrpop is great. It's a completely different approach from nom, but for parsing a programming language, I would at least consider it. RustPython uses it.

I presume LALRPOP handles left recursion just fine.

I wanted to share an experimental side project I have been working on for some time. I constantly use commands like `jq` and `yq` for processing structured data in my day job and I was curious if a similar idea could be applied to images.

Another goal of mine was to get some exposure to with rust. I discovered the LALRPOP parser generator which really helped moved the project along (https://github.com/lalrpop/lalrpop)

The key point here is that we are going to depend on the lalrpop library to generate the parser based on the formal grammar we define. Note that we have it as part of the [build-dependencies] section and we only depend on a tiny utility crate called lalrpop-util at runtime. The reason for that is the main lalrpop "magic" would happen during the crate compilation (in the build.rs file) when lalrpop would generate the deterministic pushdown automaton based on our grammar. The code generation logic is not required to be part of our interpreter, we only need a few utility methods from the lalrpop-util for the automaton to operate. You might have noticed that we also enable the lexer feature of lalrpop, because we are going to use lexer provided by lalrpop as well (please refer to the Part I if you do not know what the lexer is).