flex

Also flex: fast lexical analyzer generator: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flex_(lexical_analyser_generat... Edit: In case the parentheses don't work (percentage encoding didn't), try: https://github.com/westes/flex

I wrote a C compiler* using flex [1] and bison [2] that generated MIPS code. The biggest downside was the rather complex glue code. At some point ANTLR [3] looked promising, but these days I'd probably write a lexer and recursive descent parser by hand, then generate LLVM IR [4]. [1] https://github.com/westes/flex [2] https://www.gnu.org/software/bison/ [3] https://www.antlr.org/ [4] https://llvm.org/ * for a subset of the full C89 spec

In some way or another, most of us probably use software built in C with autotools and possibly containing flex/bison parsers. Just straight up GNU coreutils (`ls`!) needs at least the former. All the more alarming that 2 core ecosystem components have fallen into "dismaintenance": - Flex [https://github.com/westes/flex] - activity ebbed to almost zero around early 2018; year-old PRs piling up - Libtool [https://savannah.gnu.org/projects/libtool/] - last release in 2015, sparse commit activity by a lone RedHat person How could it come to these, and what can we do to address this? And what else might be falling into dismaintenance? (I only noticed these two because I tried submitting patches!) (For libtool, yes, there are much better build systems nowadays, but it's still in use -automatically pulled in by autoconf/automake- by a huge n

I remember building funny little DSL-Tools with flex and bison. https://github.com/westes/flex I used it for AutoSar applications, where you create tailored embeded programs from a DSL specification.