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kragen
peg-bootstrap
JavaScript2008–2025
kragen / peg-bootstrap

peg-bootstrap

A PEG that compiles itself.

Explore on GitHubRead Hacker News discussions
3Distinct people
18Mentions
1Explicit recommenders
76GitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

A PEG that compiles itself.

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use has been verified yet.

What people are saying

Unfortunately this is not yet a compiler; it's a lexer and a parser. Traditionally these are the first things you present in a compilers course, but from my point of view,…

kragen used a recommendation phrase. One indexed comment matches. This is a phrase match, not a verdict.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

Mentioned in the same Hacker News threads. That is not proof they are substitutes.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 8–Nov 15 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/15/2026, 12:03:30 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year18 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2008-12-21 05:53:57 UTC to 2025-07-10 02:37:58 UTC.

012342008-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2009-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments20082009-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2010-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments2010-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2011-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2011-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2012-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 4 mentions; 0 submissions, 4 comments2012-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments20162017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 3 mentions; 0 submissions, 3 comments2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 3 mentions; 2 submissions, 1 comments2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2025

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20082008-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2009-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20092009-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2010-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202
20102010-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2011-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20112011-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2012-01-01 00:00:00 UTC404
20122012-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20132013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20142014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20152015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20162016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20172017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20182018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20192019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20202020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20212021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202
20222022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC303
20232023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC321
20242024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20252025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101

What Hacker News says

1 sources
kragen·Jul 10, 2025
Plausibly this approach is trivial to understand and implements full regexes, but it is slower than the NFA or DFA approach: http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/dev3/redl.py PEGs are in some ways more powerful than regexes, and in other ways less powerful, but usually the former matter more. This is not trivial to understand but I think it's not that hard either; it's a page of code: https://github.com/kragen/peg-bootstrap/blob/master/peg.md That version doesn't memoize and so doesn't enjoy Packrat parsing's linear-time guarantee, but you can easily modify it to do so. Another subset of regexes that's easy to understand is this single-page pattern matcher by Rob Pike from TPOP: https://www.cs.princeton.edu/courses/archive/spr09/cos333/be... which is enormously less code than my single-page PEG parser generator above. But then, it doesn't ha
Read the rest
ve to compile itself.
In QRS: Epsilon Wrangling

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