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Want to parse some JSON? How about a Lisp? Or maybe Yet Another Another Markup Language? Whatever the motivation, we got you covered! We will work with a very small language with a grammar written in Pest (which is amazing!), try to understand what it’s doing, and see if we can make a hand-written(-ish) parser from scratch that is faster then the Pest-based one. Then we will look through some ways to make that even faster.
You will learn:
- That benchmarking your code and making it faster is a lot of fun!
- Scary words like Lexer, Tokenizer and Abstract Syntax Tree.
- That somewhat tedious and boring looking code can occasionally be the one that runs fastest.
- How to get rid of that somewhat tedious and boring code without losing performance.
- How to stop worrying and love ASCII.
- How to construct mostly allocation-free recursive tree structures.
- How to leverage C-like strings in (mostly) safe Rust.
This workshop is for you if:
- You are somewhat familiar with Rust, but came from a garbage collected language like JavaScript or Python and haven’t quite yet figured out how all this memory management business really works.
- By some weird accident you believe, like I do, that writing parsers is really fun.
- You have no idea about any of this, but are curious and want to learn.