langcc: A Next-Generation Compiler Compiler

TL;DR

langcc introduces a new compiler generator that automates parser creation for many programming languages, significantly improving efficiency and reducing errors compared to traditional hand-written parsers.

Contribution

It presents a novel approach to automatic parser generation based on innovations in the LR parsing paradigm, enabling efficient parsing of complex languages.

Findings

Generated parsers for Golang and Python are 1.2x and 4.3x faster than standard parsers.

The methodology simplifies parser development for languages that are easy to parse.

The software implementation is open-source and publicly available.

Abstract

Traditionally, parsing has been a laborious and error-prone component of compiler development, and most parsers for full industrial programming languages are still written by hand. The author [Zim22] shows that automatic parser generation can be practical, via a number of new innovations upon the standard LR paradigm of Knuth et al. With this methodology, we can automatically generate efficient parsers for virtually all languages that are intuitively "easy to parse". This includes Golang 1.17.8 and Python 3.9.12, for which our generated parsers are, respectively, 1.2x and 4.3x faster than the standard parsers. This document is a companion technical report which describes the software implementation of that work, which is available open-source at https://github.com/jzimmerman/langcc.