langcc: A Next-Generation Compiler Compiler

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