Review for Zach's parsing library starts> on Feb 19th
Here is my review of the proposed Boost.Parser ## What is your evaluation of the design? The design is clear with good structure. This makes the proposed Boost.Parser library easy to use. It is simultaneously quite powerful. Naming choices are intuitive, which will help both beginning as well as intermediate and advanced clients when using this library. ## What is your evaluation of the implementation? Excellent. A few suggestions for potential evolution of the library follow below. I would like to see some evidence of Code Coverage in testing. Some newer Boost libraries are showing improved quality with Code Coverage reports and statistics. Although this adds no real functionality, I think it helps prove overall quality. When compiling, I really enjoy using advanced compiler warnings. Two of my favorites on GCC are -Wconversion and -Wsign-conversion. When using these I found several easy-to-fix warnings present in the proposed Boost.Parser. Providing evidence of running modern syntax checker(s) might improve confidence in the library and/or reduce the library's vulnerability. - What is your evaluation of the documentation? It's great. The library is deep in scope and functionality. But I was able to (with help from the docs) get a small example up and running quickly. It is easy to study the docs and theyread crsply and clearly. - What is your evaluation of the potential usefulness of the library? Exceptionally high. Parsing tasks are uniformly ubiquitous in almost all programming domains. A strong, intuitive parser library fills a much needed gap in the collection. Spirit is great and hopefully will continue to be maintained. But I hope to migrate new designs to the proposed Boost.Parser and I will recommend to others to do the same. - Did you try to use the library? With what compiler? Did you have any problems? Yes absolutely. At first I tried a simple command-line interpreter. It worked immediately and was up and running within minutes. I then went on to define a simple grammar with upper-case words(and underscores) and try to parse it. This also worked perfectly. I did not have time for it yet, but I would like to attempt to make a primitive for parsing big-integers and big-floats (in the sense of Boost.Multiprecision). I tried with MSVC 2019, 2022, GCC 11-13 No issues. - How much effort did you put into your evaluation? A glance? A quick reading? In-depth study? I spent about 2 days, using the code, then did quite a bit of looking at code and reading the docs. - Are you knowledgeable about the problem domain? Yes. But only in the empirical sense. I have written many programs and applications based on and using parsers, usually parsing self-invented grammars, protocols, binary streams, lexical fragments and the like, really a lot of parser-things. Yet at the same time, I consider myself to be vastly uninformed about the formal depths of grammars, standard parser formats and the like. So it has been a struggle to move. This is what makes the proposed Boost.Parser so great. I can use the proposed Boost.Parser effectively to solve problems in my domain(s) even though my formal parser knowledge is weak. This makes the proposed Boost.Parser a valuable library. ## Do you think the library should be accepted as a Boost library? Yes! Christopher Kormanyos On Monday, February 12, 2024 at 05:04:11 PM GMT+1, Marshall Clow via Boost <boost@lists.boost.org> wrote: That’s a week from now. Github: https://github.com/tzlaine/parser Docs: https://tzlaine.github.io/parser — Marshall _______________________________________________ Unsubscribe & other changes: http://lists.boost.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/boost