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Ruby 3.4.0

ruby-lang.org

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Re: Ruby 3.4.0

#2

Post by omoikane »

I am most excited about the parser change, previously discussed here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36310130 - Rewriting the Ruby parser (2023-06-13, 176 comments)

I remember being taught to use yacc in our compiler course because "writing it by hand is too hard". But looks like Ruby joins the growing list of languages that have hand-written parsers, apparently working with generated parsers turned out to be even harder in the long run.

That said, replacing a ~16k line parse.y[1] with a 22k line prism.c[2] is a pretty bold move.

[1] https://github.com/ruby/ruby/blob/master/parse.y

[2] https://github.com/ruby/prism/blob/main/src/prism.c

Re: Ruby 3.4.0

#3

Post by PittleyDunkin »

omoikane wrote: post #2

I am most excited about the parser change, previously discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36310130 - Rewriting the Ruby parser (2023-06-13, 176 comments) I remember being taught to use yacc in our compiler course because "writing it by hand is too hard". But looks like Ruby joins the growing list of languages that have hand-written parsers, apparently working with generated parsers turned out to be e…

I'm pretty sure the only reason people ever used parser generators is that it allows a language that vaguely resembles the formal description of the target language. I always found them very confusing to write, confusing to debug, and much less efficient than writing your own. It's actually pretty straightforward once you get the tokenization and lookahead working.

Re: Ruby 3.4.0

#4

Post by ciconia »

Ruby is getting more and more awesome these last few years, especially when it comes to performance. Since 3.3 I've been running all my apps with --yjit, it makes a tremendous difference!

Re: Ruby 3.4.0

#6

Post by pests »

PittleyDunkin wrote: post #3
omoikane wrote: post #2

I am most excited about the parser change, previously discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36310130 - Rewriting the Ruby parser (2023-06-13, 176 comments) I remember being taught to use yacc in our compiler course because "writing it by hand is too hard". But looks like Ruby joins the growing list of languages that have hand-written parsers, apparently working with generated parsers turned out to be e…

I'm pretty sure the only reason people ever used parser generators is that it allows a language that vaguely resembles the formal description of the target language. I always found them very confusing to write, confusing to debug, and much less efficient than writing your own. It's actually pretty straightforward once you get the tokenization and lookahead working.

Agreed. Parser generators are a magic black box. Parsing is not too difficult, there is some actual computer science in some spots, but I think parsing should be a core complacency of a programming language to unlock full potential.
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