Lexer and parser generators using CTFE

[Andrei Alexandrescu]

On 6/1/12 8:39 AM, Ken wrote:
> Great! So what's the next step? Do we wait for the maintainers of one of
> the CTFE parser gen packages to drop it in the Phobos Review Queue? Do a
> reimplementation for Phobos?
>
> We could attack this in pieces. Start with a lexer/FSA generator (like
> Ragel but using CTFE) - this will make it much easier to consume many
> wire protocols, for starters (I found it very easy to make a simple HTTP
> client using Ragel), and will be quite useful on its own. Then extend it
> into a lexer for a parser generator.

I think this core strength of the language should be properly supplanted 
by library support, so I'd be very interested to look at Phobos 
proposals. The proposals should come with sample grammars of nontrivial 
size, ideally a parser for the entire D language.

There might be things to fix in the compiler, e.g. memory consumption.


Andrei