Gazelle: a system for building fast, reusable parsers

http://www.reverberate.org/gazelle/

PRELIMINARY WARNING

While Gazelle is getting quite usable, the language and the APIs are still quite subject to change.

Still with me? Great. :)

BUILDING

You need to have Lua installed to do anything interesting. The C runtime doesn't need Lua, but without Lua you can't compile any grammars.

Gazelle should build mostly out-of-the-box on UNIX-like systems if Lua 5.1 is installed, but you may need to tweak the Makefile to point to your local Lua installation. Ubuntu Linux, Debian and Mac OS X are tested. To install dependencies on Ubuntu or Debian, type:

$ sudo aptitude install lua5.1 liblua5.1-0-dev

To build and install Gazelle, type:

$ make $ make install

You can change the installation location as follows:

$ make PREFIX=/usr/local $ make install PREFIX=/usr/local DESTDIR=/tmp

This will install Gazelle into /tmp/usr/local.

To build the documentation, you need to have asciidoc installed, as well as graphviz if you want to see the graphics.

$ make doc

Alternatively you can just read the manual on the Gazelle website.

ROADMAP OF THE SOURCE

compiler/ what parses the grammar, turns it into state machines, and dumps into bytcode compiler/bootstrap compiler code that will not be needed once Gazelle is self-hosting lang_ext/ wrappers around the C runtime, for high-level languages (currently only Lua) runtime/ the tiny, fast, small-memory-footprint C runtime that actually does the parsing runtime/include public header files for the runtime. sketches/ code that is either half-written or for debugging-only tests/ unit tests (not very many at the moment) utilities/ command-line utilities for doing useful things

CONTACT

For questions, comments, etc. please post to the gazelle-users group. I read and respond to posts on this list. http://groups.google.com/group/gazelle-users

If you need to contact me directly, I am: Joshua Haberman [email protected]