Before this commit, the |?| operator returned an empty string upon
unsuccessful match. This commit changes the returned value to |null|. It
also updates the PEG.js grammar and the example grammars, which used the
value returned by |?| quite often.
Returning |null| is possible because it no longer indicates a match
failure.
I expect that this change will simplify many real-world grammars, as an
empty string is almost never desirable as a return value (except some
lexer-level rules) and it is often translated into |null| or some other
value in action code.
Implements part of #198.
Using a special value to indicate match failure instead of |null| allows
actions to return |null| as a regular value. This simplifies e.g. the
JSON parser.
Note the special value is internal and intentionally undocumented. This
means that there is currently no official way how to trigger a match
failure from an action. This is a temporary state which will be fixed
soon.
The negative performance impact (see below) is probably caused by
changing lot of comparisons against |null| (which likely check the value
against a fixed constant representing |null| in the interpreter) to
comparisons against the special value (which likely check the value
against another value in the interpreter).
Implements part of #198.
Speed impact
------------
Before: 1146.82 kB/s
After: 1031.25 kB/s
Difference: -10.08%
Size impact
-----------
Before: 950817 b
After: 973269 b
Difference: 2.36%
(Measured by /tools/impact with Node.js v0.6.18 on x86_64 GNU/Linux.)
Before this commit, the |expected| property of an exception object
thrown when a generated parser encountered an error contained
expectations as strings. These strings were in a human-readable format
suitable for displaying in the UI but not suitable for machine
processing. For example, expected string literals included quotes and a
string "any character" was used when any character was expected.
This commit makes expectations structured objects. This makes the
machine processing easier, while still allowing to generate a
human-readable representation if needed.
Implements part of #198.
Speed impact
------------
Before: 1180.41 kB/s
After: 1165.31 kB/s
Difference: -1.28%
Size impact
-----------
Before: 863523 b
After: 950817 b
Difference: 10.10%
(Measured by /tools/impact with Node.js v0.6.18 on x86_64 GNU/Linux.)
JavaScript allows one to skip (elide) elements in array literals. It
also allows a trailing comma, which doesn't imply an element elision.
For example, an array literal:
[,,,]
contains three elided elements (one before each comma) and a trailing
comma.
Example JavaScript parser handled elided elements incorrectly and just
threw them away. This commit fixes this behvior and inserts |null| in
the AST for each elided element. This is in line with how SpiderMonkey's
JavaScript parser (the |Reflect.parse| API), Esprima and Acorn behave.
Based on a patch by @fpirsch:
https://github.com/dmajda/pegjs/pull/177
Makes the |ArrayLiteral| and |ElementList| rules more in line with the
ECMAScript grammar.
Based on a patch by @fpirsch:
https://github.com/dmajda/pegjs/pull/177
We couldn't return |null| in the |value| rule of the JSON example
parser because that would mean parse failure. So until now, we just
returned |"null"| (a string).
This was obviously stupid, so this commit changes the |value| rule to
return a special object instead that is converted to |null| later.
Based on patches by Patrick Logan (GH-91) and Jakub Vrána (GH-191).
In the bytecode generator, the |context.action| property wasn't
correctly reset when generating bytecode for sequence elements. As a
result, when a sequence was wrapped in an action and it contained
another sequence as an element, the generator thought that the inner
sequence was wrapped in an action too.
For example, the following grammar:
start = ("a" "b") "c" { return "x"; }
was compiled as if it looked like this:
start = ("a" "b" { return "x"; }) "c" { return "x"; }
This commit fixes the problem by resetting |context.action| correctly.
Fixes GH-168.
Code that calculated which part of the input to match against a literal
was wrong in case of case-insensitive literals when generating
speed-optimized parsers. As a result, matching of case-insensitive
literals worked only at the end of the input (where too big length
passed to the |substr| method didn't matter).
Fixes GH-153.
The deduplication skipped over an expected string right after the one
that was removed because the index variable was incorrectly incremented
in that case.
Based on a patch by @fresheneesz:
https://github.com/dmajda/pegjs/pull/146
The compiler passes are now split into three stages:
* check -- passes that check for various error conditions
* transform -- passes that transform the AST (e.g. to perform
optimizations)
* generate -- passes that are related to code generation
Splitting the passes into stages is important for plugins. For example,
if a plugin wants to add a new optimization pass, it can add it at the
end of the "transform" stage without any knowledge about other passes it
contains. Similarly, if it wants to generate something else than the
default code generator does from the AST, it can just replace all passes
in the "generate" stage by its own one(s).
More generally, the stages make it possible to write plugins that do not
depend on names and actions of specific passes (which I consider
internal and subject of change), just on the definition of stages (which
I consider a public API with to which semver rules apply).
Implements part of GH-106.
The |plugins| option allows users to use plugins that change how PEG.js
operates.
A plugin is any JavaScript object with a |use| method. After the user
calls |PEG.buildParser|, this method is called for each plugin with the
following two parameters:
* PEG.js config that describes used grammar parser and compiler
passes used to generate the parser
* options passed by user to |PEG.buildParser|
The plugin is expected to change the config as needed, possibly based on
the options passed by user. It can e.g. change the used grammar parser,
change the compiler passes (including adding its own), etc. This way it
can extend PEG.js in a flexible way.
Implements part of GH-106.
Fix automatic semi-colon insertion in var statements without
initialisers.
var i
i = 1;
is valid and not accepted by the parser
but
var i = 2
i = 3;
is valid and accepted by the parser, as it should be.
With this fix, both are accepted.
The |passes| parameter will allow to pass the list of passes from
|PEG.buildParser|. This will be used by plugins. The old way via setting
the |appliedPassNames| property is removed.
Implements part of GH-106.
Fixes the following JSHint errors (which I think are JSHint bugs):
spec/parser.spec.js: line 142, col 20, Bad for in variable 'key'.
spec/generated-parser.spec.js: line 119, col 20, Bad for in variable 'key'.
This is a complete rewrite of the PEG.js code generator. Its goals are:
1. Allow optimizing the generated parser code for code size as well as
for parsing speed.
2. Prepare ground for future optimizations and big features (like
incremental parsing).
2. Replace the old template-based code-generation system with
something more lightweight and flexible.
4. General code cleanup (structure, style, variable names, ...).
New Architecture
----------------
The new code generator consists of two steps:
* Bytecode generator -- produces bytecode for an abstract virtual
machine
* JavaScript generator -- produces JavaScript code based on the
bytecode
The abstract virtual machine is stack-based. Originally I wanted to make
it register-based, but it turned out that all the code related to it
would be more complex and the bytecode itself would be longer (because
of explicit register specifications in instructions). The only downsides
of the stack-based approach seem to be few small inefficiencies (see
e.g. the |NIP| instruction), which seem to be insignificant.
The new generator allows optimizing for parsing speed or code size (you
can choose using the |optimize| option of the |PEG.buildParser| method
or the --optimize/-o option on the command-line).
When optimizing for size, the JavaScript generator emits the bytecode
together with its constant table and a generic bytecode interpreter.
Because the interpreter is small and the bytecode and constant table
grow only slowly with size of the grammar, the resulting parser is also
small.
When optimizing for speed, the JavaScript generator just compiles the
bytecode into JavaScript. The generated code is relatively efficient, so
the resulting parser is fast.
Internal Identifiers
--------------------
As a small bonus, all internal identifiers visible to user code in the
initializer, actions and predicates are prefixed by |peg$|. This lowers
the chance that identifiers in user code will conflict with the ones
from PEG.js. It also makes using any internals in user code ugly, which
is a good thing. This solves GH-92.
Performance
-----------
The new code generator improved parsing speed and parser code size
significantly. The generated parsers are now:
* 39% faster when optimizing for speed
* 69% smaller when optimizing for size (without minification)
* 31% smaller when optimizing for size (with minification)
(Parsing speed was measured using the |benchmark/run| script. Code size
was measured by generating parsers for examples in the |examples|
directory and adding up the file sizes. Minification was done by |uglify
--ascii| in version 1.3.4.)
Final Note
----------
This is just a beginning! The new code generator lays a foundation upon
which many optimizations and improvements can (and will) be made.
Stay tuned :-)
Previously, the report-left-recursion and report-missing-rules passes
used PEG.GrammarError without requiring it, causing a ReferenceError.
Since requiring lib/peg.js would cause circular requirements, this
commit imports lib/grammar-error.js as GrammarError.
The bug was introduced in commit
4cda79951a.
Fixes GH-135.
When called inside an action, the |text| function returns the text
matched by action's expression. It can be also called inside an
initializer or a predicate where it returns an empty string.
The |text| function will be useful mainly in cases where one needs a
structured representation of the input and simultaneously the raw text.
Until now, the only way to get the raw text in these cases was to
painfully build it from the structured representation.
Fixes GH-131.
David Majda
Andrei Neculau
Jakub Vrana
Tony Lukasavage
fpirsch
Justin Blank