Exploring parsing APIs: the cost of recursion

A while ago I came up with an “error handling expressiveness benchmark”, some common error handling cases that I want to support in Fir. After 7 months of pondering and hacking, I think designed a system that meets all of the requirements. Error handling in Fir is safe, expressive, and convenient to use. Here are some examples of what we can do...

Especially in high-level languages, inlining is most useful when it causes: Optimizing the callee’s body based on the arguments passed. Optimizing the call site based on the callee’s return value. Let’s look at some examples. Example: avoiding redundant bounds checks Suppose we have a library for decoding some format of binary files with...

In the previous post we looked at three different parsing APIs, and compared them for runtime and the use cases they support. In this post we’ll add a lexer (or “tokenizer”), with two APIs, and for each lexer API see how the parsers from the previous post perform when combined with a lexer. What is a lexer? A lexer is very similar to the event...

Consider a simplified and enhanced version of JSON, with these changes: Numbers are 64-bit unsigned integers. Strings cannot have control and escape characters. Single-line comments are allowed, with the usual syntax: // ... . When parsing a language like this, a common first step if to define an “abstract syntax tree” (AST), with only the...

The main use case of resumable exceptions would be collecting a bunch of errors (instead of bailing out after the first one) to log or show to the user, or actually recovering and continuing from the point of error detection, rather than in a call site. Why not design the code to allow error recovery, instead of using a language feature? There...