[sedachv]

> You cannot parse it properly without symbol table. No context free parser handles C properly, let alone C++. It gets progressively and exponentially worse from here.

C is actually pretty easy if you ignore all of the bad advice to use parser generators. I looked into the various YACC grammars for C I could find on the Internet, and all of them either had bugs or were incomplete. TCC[1] has a simple recursive-descent parser. With a recursive descent parser you also have the option of implementing the C pre-processor in the same step. Turns out I was able to implement a single-pass C parser and pre-processor as a bunch of Common Lisp read macros[2].

I have not looked into it, but the approach for C++ looks like it would be very different because template instantiation needs its own step.

[1] https://bellard.org/tcc/ [2] https://github.com/vsedach/Vacietis/blob/master/compiler/rea...