Re: Which lexer do people use?

[Akim Demaille]

Hi Daniele,

> Le 3 juil. 2020 à 23:15, Daniele Nicolodi <daniele@grinta.net> a écrit :
> 
> Hello,
> 
> the historical pairing is using Flex with Bison. However, while Bison is
> under active development and seems to be a very solid code base, there
> isn't much activity on the Flex side https://github.com/westes/flex and
> Flex codebase and capabilities show their age.

Yes.  I have a couple of issues opened over there, and it takes for ages
to get them processed.  When they are.

When I tried to modernize the Flex doc about Bison, they even managed to
turn this into a lecture about software maintenance.  And not install
my changes.

https://github.com/westes/flex/pull/420

> I recently became aware of RE/flex https://www.genivia.com/reflex.html
> which seems very promising. However, it only generates a C++ scanner
> which may be (I haven't tried) to retro-fit into existing C projects to,
> for example, gain full unicode (in its utf8 encoded form) support.

It seems amazing.  Featurewise and performancewise.  I did not know it
(nor did I know ugrep).

I've seen projects use ragel (http://www.colm.net/open-source/ragel/)
and re2c (https://re2c.org).  But, sadly, I have first-hand experience
with Flex only, I can't comment about the others.


> Has anyone tried to hammer a C++ scanner peg generated by RE/flex into a
> C grammar hole generated by Bison?
> 
> Which other scanners do people use?

Fine question.  I'm eager to read the answers!

Cheers!