On 11/15/2011 1:08 AM, Gene Bushuyev wrote:
"John Bytheway" <jbytheway+boost@gmail.com> wrote in message news:j9qp21$f09$1@dough.gmane.org...
On 13/11/11 23:39, Gene Bushuyev wrote:
Sorry if it turns out to be a duplicate, it looks my original post was lost in cyberspace, so I'm re-posting this request.
I'm trying to determine if there is a sufficient interest for including AXE C++11 recursive descent parser generator library in Boost. The zipped sources and documentation are here: http://www.gbresearch.com/axe/axe.zip
People are more likely to investigate if you can provide a link to the documentation online somewhere, so they don't have to download and extract a zip file.
It would also be useful to explain briefly how it compares with Boost.Spirit.
John Bytheway
It's true there is a significant overlap with Spirit. It's also true there is more than one way to do the parsing, so some people will be more comfortable with Spirit, and I have reasons to believe some people will be more comfortable with AXE. There are differences, importance of which depends on personal perspective and needs. I tried to summarize below what I would consider advantages of AXE:
* it's a much smaller header only library: 15 files, 126 KB total * it has no dependencies on other libraries apart from the Standard library * it uses only standard facilities, so theoretically it should work with any C++11 compiler without any modifications * compilation times are much shorter than Spirit * the syntax is less cryptic than Spirit, so it's easier to remember, write, debug, and read parsers written in AXE (this is, of course, subjective) * in my limited comparison, parsers written in AXE take fewer lines of code to write, and development times are shorter
Disadvantages: * AXE requires C++11 compiler, current status of compiler support is unknown * It's been released recently, thus there is limited experience working with it
When Spirit debuted, it was a 7 header file. If your library gets more mature, the added complexity will be necessary. Your main advantage is simplicity. I can't argue with that. However, it is also your big disadvantage. Here are some more important points you missed in your Disadvantages section: * It does not have unicode support. * It does not have attributes and AST support. It is a purely transduction parser like Spirit 1.0. So in every step, you have to convert an iterator range to an attribute manually. * It does not have support for polymorphic semantic actions (you know that c++ lambda is monomorphic, right?). * It does not have reusable grammars * No symbol tables * No character sets * No separation of grammar construction and parsing. Your examples have a big overhead: they build the parser every time you parse. * The syntax is *more* cryptic than Spirit (this is, of course, subjective :-) Just to name a few. Regards, -- Joel de Guzman http://www.boostpro.com http://boost-spirit.com