Question from Bison's maintainer on the D backend

[Manu]

On Sun, Nov 18, 2018 at 10:41 PM Manu <turkeyman at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On Sun, Nov 18, 2018 at 8:00 AM Andrei Alexandrescu via Digitalmars-d
> <digitalmars-d at puremagic.com> wrote:
> >
> > Hello, Akim Demaille, the maintainer of the famed GNU Bison parser
> > generator, reached out to me with the following (published with his accord):
> >
> > ====
> > I’m the maintainer of GNU Bison, which is a parser generator for C/C++
> > and Java.  A few years ago someone contributed a D backend for Bison,
> > but at that time, the investment in Bison was low.  Now I’m spending
> > time on it, and Richard Stallman asked me to contact the « D community »
> > to know whether there would be interest for such a backend.
> >
> > Bison is a LALR(1), LR(1), IELR(1) and GLR parser generator.  It’s based
> > on ye olde yacc, by it features several interesting properties.
> >
> > Of course the D world already features several parser generators, some
> > being even embedded in the language and benefiting from compile time
> > function evaluation.  So it’s very unclear to me if Bison would get some
> > interest.
> >
> > What would you think about that?
> > ====
> >
> > I wrote back that Bison is currently much more sophisticated than the
> > present alternatives in the D community, and that we'd be interested in
> > continued maintenance of the D backend for Bison. Further discussion
> > revealed:
> >
> > ====
> > I would say that my first and foremost worry would be to integrate
> > something which is not used, and not maintained.  And I am not a D
> > programmer, so I would not be able to decide whether his work was good
> > or not, have it evolve with Bison and releases of D.
> >
> > Also, something that somewhat worries me is that the D parser was based
> > on the Java parser, not the C++ one.
> > ====
> >
> > More thoughts and reports from the community would be helpful. If you
> > are a current or former Bison user with the D backend, or if you have an
> > interest in contributing reviews and patches for it,  please chime in.
> >
> >
> > Thanks,
> >
> > Andrei
>
> I use Bison in a D project, but since it emits C/C++, I use an
> elaborate extern(C++) based solution to interact with the Bison
> output.
> The binding layer is hard to maintain, and I don't work on the project
> much because of the friction.
>
> I evaluated the native D parsers, but quickly switched back to Bison
> because it just works, and works very well.
> I was also motivated by the fact the parser also had C++ output, since
> writing any project exclusively in D is a risk, and reverting to C++
> is always a possibility in the event D fails.
>
> I can say for certain, if Bison emit D output, I would use it, and get
> much value from it!

That said, to your question, I have no experience with the Bison D
backend (it never occurred to me that such a thing may exist)... just
the C++ backend.
Where are builds to try out?