GSOC 2011

[Jacob Carlborg]

On 2011-03-24 05:30, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
> On 3/23/11 11:42 AM, Luca Boasso wrote:
>> Sorry for the late reply,
>> even tough I'm not an ANTLR expert, given my previous experience with
>> the tool
>> and having read most of the official book, I could help more on this GSOC
>> idea.
>>
>> I have looked at http://www.antlr.org/grammar/list and on google and I
>> could not
>> find any recent ANTLR grammar for D.
>> In my opinion this project could be a good contribution for the D
>> community
>> while being practical and useful in the short term.
>
> There are two aspects: writing an ANTLR grammar that parses D (which you
> are referring to) and also adding to ANTLR the capability of generating
> D. The latter would allow D users to create and use parsers for various
> languages. It would also require close cooperation with the ANTLR people
> for acceptance etc.
>
> (Sticking with the former project for now.) This is a technically
> interesting project. I'd need to hear more about the high-level
> motivation. What is the "business" motivation? There is already a parser
> for D written in C++ (the open-source front-end of dmd), so the project
> would need to build a good case for the added value. Also there are
> other D parser projects that people work on (ddmd comes to mind), so I'd
> need to hear a lot more in the way of justifying the utility of such a
> project.
>
>
> Thanks,
>
> Andrei

Isn't it obvious, to be able to create tools that needs to parse/lex D 
code. If parser/lexer is included in Phobos that is basically a port of 
the C++ one in DMD and DMD starts to use the D version it will be a huge 
win. The parser/lexer in Phobos will always automatically be up to date 
with the one the compiler uses because they are actually the same.

As far as I know DDMD cannot be easily used to build other tools that 
needs to parse/lex D code in it's current state. That is a long term 
goal but not even the short term goal, of being up to date with DMD and 
produce the same code as DMD, has been reached yet.

-- 
/Jacob Carlborg