Tag: parsers

How to write a parser using rust and lalrpop crate? In this article, we are going to walk through the implementation of parsing a string like this:

This is a {dog, cat}.

And we want to expand this string into the following two strings:

This is a dog.
This is a cat.

Why don’t I implement a nice monadic parser combinator library in Rust? That’s what my thought was when after implementing low-level mock-HTTP server in MIO and actually needed to parse the bytes received by server. What I wanted is a declative way to define sequence of strings to be matched and/or extracted.

Tree-sitter is a parser generator tool and parsing library. It generates portable parsers that can be used in several languages including Rust. Tree-sitter grammars are available for several languages. This is a game changer because it lowers the barrier to entry for writing language tooling. You no longer need to write your own parser. With Tree-sitter, you can now simply use an existing parser.

nom, the Rust parser combinators library, is now available at version 5. This is the most mature version of nom. This is the one that feels “done”. This is the parser library that I wanted when I started nom 5 years ago. It’s here at last. nom 5 is a complete rewrite of the internal architecture, to use functions instead of macros, while keeping backward compatibility with existing macros based parsers, and making the error type completely generic.

It took nearly 6 months of development and the library went through nearly 5 entire rewrites. Compare that to previous major releases, which took a month at most to do. But it was worth it! This new release cleans up a lot of old bugs and unintuitive behaviours, simplifies some common patterns, is faster, uses less memory, gives better errors, but the way parsers are written stay the same. It’s like an entirely new engine under the same body work!