CompilerKit will be a parser combinator based compiler construction library in C.
Read how to hack on CompilerKit.
LGPL version 2.1 or later.
CompilerKit aims to streamline developing any software deriving tree structures from text, including compilers and interpreters. This library will be the final product of a compiler design class.
This library aims to avoid problems in existing tools by doing these:
Many existing compiler construction tools:
A parser combinator is a higher-order function that creates parsers from parsers.
Similar libraries:
Proposed example usage:
Nonterminal * value = nonterminal ("value");
Nonterminal * product = nonterminal ("product");
Nonterminal * sum = nonterminal ("sum");
Nonterminal * expr = nonterminal ("expr");
Parser * formula = derivative_parser (expr);
/*
Define the grammar below:
value -> [0-9]+ | (expr)
product -> value ((*|/) value)*
sum -> product ((+|-) product)*
expr -> sum
*/
value->becomes (many1(digit()));
value->becomes (parens(expr));
product->becomes (value, many (or(symbol('*'),symbol('/')), value));
sum->becomes (product, many (or(symbol('+'), symbol('-')), product));
expr->becomes (sum);
/* Return whether the formula parser matched the expression "(1+2+3+4)/2". Should return true */
formula->match("(1+2+3+4)/2");
/* Free the parser. */
parser_free (formula);
This library will use GObject internally.
We will employ test-first pair programming in the development of CompilerKit. (By the way, if you have a better name for this, I'm all ears.)
Testing and documentation first ensures that we consider the usage of this library before we develop it. It also helps track development progress by test completion and coverage.
Pair programming ensures that we learn from each other.
The library will consist of the following components:
The regular expression engine will be swappable:
The scanner requires a regular expression engine to work.
The parser construction will be separate from the swappable parsing backends:
Language bindings will make use of GObject introspection. This library will target support for: