On Jul 3, 2020, at 11:14 PM, Akim Demaille <a...@lrde.epita.fr> wrote: > > Hi Daniele, > >> Le 3 juil. 2020 à 23:15, Daniele Nicolodi <dani...@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
My experience as well. I have found them to be unhelpful, slow, and argumentative. At times, I’ve thought about branching flex and cleaning up the obvious problems, but — since it’s really not that hard to write a lexer — I just roll my own. This is much better and it integrates well with bison, unlike the hoops needed when I use flex. > >> 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. This is very interesting. It’s good for me since I pretty much only use C++. >> Has anyone tried to hammer a C++ scanner peg generated by RE/flex into a >> C grammar hole generated by Bison? Let us know how it works out if you try! Derek
