skade/lib-ruby-parser

lib-ruby-parser

lib-ruby-parser is a Ruby parser written in Rust.

Basic usage:

use lib_ruby_parser::{Parser, ParserOptions};

fn main() -> Result<(), Box<dyn std::error::Error>> {
    let options = ParserOptions {
        buffer_name: "(eval)".to_owned(),
        debug: true,
        ..Default::default()
    };
    let mut parser = Parser::new(b"2 + 2", options)?;

    println!("{:#?}", parser.do_parse());

    Ok(())
}

Full documentation

Features

TLDR; it's fast, it's precise, and it has a beautiful interface.

Comparison with Ripper/RubyVM::AST:

1. It's based on MRI's parse.y, and so it returns exactly the same sequence of tokens.
2. It's been tested on top 300 gems (by total downlads, that's about 3M LOC), rubyspec and ruby/ruby repos and there's no difference with Ripper.lex.
3. It's as fast as Ripper (with jemalloc), both parse 3M LOC in 15s. That's ~200K LOC/s.
4. It has a much, much better interface. AST is strongly typed and well documented.
5. It doesn't throw away information about tokens. All nodes have information about their source locations.

Comparison with whitequark/parser:

1. It's much faster (the same corpus of 3M LOC can be parsed in 180s on the same machine)
2. It has a very similar interface (both in terms of AST structure and errors reporting)
3. However, AST is strongly typed, and so if something is nullable it's explicitly defined and documented.
4. What's important, it doesn't depend on Ruby

Versioning

lib-ruby-parser follows MRI/master. There are no plans to support multiple versions like it's done in whitequark/parser.

Encodings

By default lib-ruby-parser can only parse source files encoded in UTF-8 or ASCII-8BIT/BINARY.

It's possible to pass a decoder function in ParserOptions that takes a recognized (by the library) encoding and a byte array. It must return a UTF-8 encoded byte array or an error:

use lib_ruby_parser::source::{InputError, RecognizedEncoding};

fn decoder(encoding: RecognizedEncoding, input: &[u8]) -> Result<Vec<u8>, InputError> {
    if let RecognizedEncoding::US_ASCII = encoding {
        // reencode and return Ok(result)
        return Ok(b"2 + 2".to_vec());
    }
    Err(InputError::DecodingError(
        "only us-ascii is supported".to_owned(),
    ))
}

fn parse(input: Vec<u8>) -> Result<(), Box<dyn std::error::Error>>{
    let options = ParserOptions {
        decoder: Some(Box::new(decoder)),
        ..Default::default()
    };

    let result = Parser::new(b"3 + 3", options)?.do_parse();
    println!("{:#?}", result);
    // prints AST for "2 + 2"
}

Invalid string values

Ruby doesn't require string literals to be valid in their encodings. This is why the following code is valid:

# encoding: utf-8

"\xFF"

Byte sequence 255 is invalid in UTF-8, but MRI ignores it.

But not all languages support it, and this is why string and symbol nodes encapsulate a custom StringValue instead of a plain String.

If your langauge supports invalid strings you can use raw .bytes of this StringValue. For example, a Ruby wrapper for this library could do that.

If your language doesn't support it, better call .to_string_lossy() that replaces all unsupported chars with a special U+FFFD REPLACEMENT CHARACTER (�).

Regexes

Ruby constructs regexes from literals during parsing to:

1. validate them
2. declare local variables if regex is used for matching AND it contains named captures

To mirror this behavior lib-ruby-parser uses Onigurama to compile, validate and parse regex literals.

This feature is disabled by default, but you can add it by enabling "onig" feature.

Bison

The grammar of lib-ruby-parser is built using a custom bison skeleton that was written for this project.

For development you need the latest version of Bison installed locally. Of course, it's not necessary for release builds from crates.io (because compiled parser.rs is included into release build AND build.rs that converts it is excluded).

If you use it from GitHub directly you also need Bison (because parser.rs is under gitignore)

Bindings for other languages

• C
• C++
• Node.js
• WASM (with live demo)

Profiling

You can use parse example:

$ RUSTFLAGS="-C debug-assertions=n" cargo run --all-features --example parse -- -qq --profile "<pattern>"

Benchmarking

A pretty big codebase could be generated using a download.rb script:

$ ruby gems/download.rb
$ cargo run --release --all-features --example parse -- --no-output "gems/repos/**/*.rb"