Re: ANN: Lua Grammar/Parser Available

[Frank Mitchell <frank_mitchell_us@...>]

On Mon, 6 Mar 2023 at 14:23, Jonathan Revusky <revusky@congocc.org> wrote:
> I haven't posted here before. I'm the lead developer of the Congo Parser Generator project. 
> Congo, in its origins, is actually a full rewrite of the ancient JavaCC, developed at Sun 
> Microsystems in the 90's. So the parser that it generates is in Java. There is also the ability 
> to generate parsers in Python and C#, but that is currently less complete/polished than the 
> Java code generation.

Back in the Before Time, in the Long Long Ago, I worked with JavaCC, and it's pretty nice. It generates the sort of parser you'd create by hand ... if you had that kind of time and expertise.

A Lua interpreter in Java was once my dream when everyone was doing interpreters in Java (Rhino Javascript, Jython, JRuby, etc.). I figured it would give the language more exposure. Writing the interpreter was one of my big stumbling blocks. Another was compiling Lua into Java bytecode for speed, although the ASM library looks more than capable. (Hint, hint.)

A Lua interpreter in JavaScript would be kind of ironic, though.  In an ideal world the ubiquitous embedded language of browsers and other things would be Lua or something like it, not a pretend Java literally hacked out in a week. (JavaScript has gotten better, but under the hood JavaScript is far more Lua-like than Java-like.) So here's hoping you generate JavaScript parsers sooner rather than later.

Anyway, good luck with Congo. I'll definitely check it out.


Frank Mitchell