D compiler front end in Phobos (was: syntax definition language)

[Gor Gyolchanyan]

Making a general-purpose parser is the secondary issue. The primary
issue is having a D parser.


On Mon, Oct 24, 2011 at 11:47 AM, Martin Nowak <dawg at dawgfoto.de> wrote:
> On Sun, 23 Oct 2011 21:56:34 +0200, Gor Gyolchanyan
> <gor.f.gyolchanyan at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Yes. a general-purpose parsing tool would be great.
>> I don't think, that porting DMD's front-end is a good idea, because
>> it's far from being generic or modular.
>> We're gonna have to start from scratch.
>>
>> Optionally, it would be really great to make it CTFE-able, so it could
>> be used to provide a complete compile-time reflection.
>>
> The issue being, that most approaches to generic parsing
> suffer from unspecific error handling, bad integration with client code
> and the need for dynamic typing in the parse tree.
> Language integrated approaches as boost::spirit mostly fail for
> anything but simple and regular parsing (e.g. CSV).
>
> My personal conclusion is that I will waste no more time on trying to use or
> write
> general parsers, it's much more pleasant to write recursive decent parsers.
>
> martin
>
>> On Sun, Oct 23, 2011 at 10:40 PM, Jonathan M Davis <jmdavisProg at gmx.com>
>> wrote:
>>>
>>> On Sunday, October 23, 2011 22:27:17 Gor Gyolchanyan wrote:
>>>>
>>>> cool!
>>>> I really _REALY_ want to get a working D front-end into Phobos.
>>>> preferably during my lifetime.
>>>> Obviously there's some work already done in this area.
>>>> I'd like us to chip in and discuss this in-depth and come up with a
>>>> plan to do this.
>>>> AFAIK everyone was in favor of a front-end as a library solution.
>>>
>>> The two proposed approaches at the moment are to port dmd's frontend to D
>>> for
>>> Phobos and to write a template-based generative, generic solution. The
>>> first
>>> would obviously be D-specific. The second would be for _any_ language. In
>>> either case, any solution needs to be broken up into a lexer, parser,
>>> etc. in
>>> manner which allows you to use only the pieces that you need for a
>>> particular
>>> application.
>>>
>>> And so unless you're going with the "port dmd frontend to D" approach,
>>> any
>>> solution really needs to be generic and not D-specific. Naturally, we'll
>>> provied whatever's needed to generate the D lexer, parser, etc. as part
>>> of
>>> Phobos, but the lexer, paresr, etc. need to be generic and generative
>>> rather
>>> than D-specfiic.
>>>
>>> http://www.mail-archive.com/digitalmars-d@puremagic.com/msg40358.html
>>>
>>> - Jonathan M Davis
>