Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by judofyr 2379 days ago
(Author here!)

> This isn't the author's only reason to dismiss that alternative approach, but it's still a strange point to spend almost an entire paragraph on. If all the targets the author currently envisions are GC'd languages, it's premature pessimization to worry about how other, hypothetical, targets might be accommodated.

Aah. I should probably have clarified that. At Sanity.io today we only need JavaScript and Go, and those are the most imminent languages to support (and what I can actually spend time on during work). However, as an overall parser algorithm I consider it crucial to be able to easily target C as this would unlock a whole new world of possibilities.

Does that make it more clear?

> but it's still a strange point to spend almost an entire paragraph on

Yeah, this article isn't exactly short on details. The purpose of this post was a mixture between (1) arguing for the value of declarative-based grammars, (2) showing all of the fascinating algorithms that have been discovered, and (3) showing how Glush works.

I've had a great time playing with Parsing with Derivatives so even if I didn't end up directly using it, I feel like sharing cool ideas to new people.

1 comments

Thanks for your response. You made your point more explicit, but I still think that being afraid of GC due to planning to support C at some point could be premature pessimization. Your milage obviously varies!

Also, yes, thank you for mentioning Parsing with Derivatives and all the other stuff, I really liked the overview you gave of the field.