I remember being taught to use yacc in our compiler course because "writing it by hand is too hard". But looks like Ruby joins the growing list of languages that have hand-written parsers, apparently working with generated parsers turned out to be even harder in the long run.
That said, replacing a ~16k line parse.y[1] with a 22k line prism.c[2] is a pretty bold move.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36310130 - Rewriting the Ruby parser (2023-06-13, 176 comments)
I remember being taught to use yacc in our compiler course because "writing it by hand is too hard". But looks like Ruby joins the growing list of languages that have hand-written parsers, apparently working with generated parsers turned out to be even harder in the long run.
That said, replacing a ~16k line parse.y[1] with a 22k line prism.c[2] is a pretty bold move.
[1] https://github.com/ruby/ruby/blob/master/parse.y
[2] https://github.com/ruby/prism/blob/main/src/prism.c