[weberc2]

This is suuuper cool. I've thought of doing something similar for a while, but I tried approaching it from the "generate Go" angle. I also found the Go syntax too tedious to write a parser for (because I've never written a parser before, nor any kind of compiler, so the learning curve was too steep). So I was just going to try to build a simple, expression-based language that compiled to (and interoped with) Go. Unfortunately, I ran out of steam because the learning curve was so steep.

[nemo1618]

One approach would be to use the existing Go parser packages and modify them to suit your needs. Unfortunately (last time I checked) the standard library packages for this (go/ast, go/types, etc.) differ from the actual packages used by the Go compiler. But they might be close enough to suit your needs.

[weberc2]

I recall experimenting with that, but I had a hard time making them work correctly (although I don't recall the details--might've been something to do with their parser DSL or something). The compiler doesn't use the stdlib because the compiler was originally implemented in C, and then they did a mechanical C -> Go translation.

[pravj]

Didn't know that the compiler itself isn't using the same packages after going in a bootstrapped fashion.

Using the existing packages is a great approach as I think that Go standard library has one of the best packages supported for AST/lexing/parsing family, in comparison to Python and Ruby. Haven't worked with Rust.