AntLR can do this, although it does not work that well. I used the C backend, which is pretty directly ported from the Java backend. C-in-Java-style is pretty awkward.
ANTLR is not the same as what I am describing. ANTLR generates code in each target language: I am talking about a common runtime that all languages call into. Think of it as a "parsing VM." Using this scheme, there would be no need to have separate backends for C and Java, the only thing you'd need to port is the bindings.
Fast parsing from any language (even slow languages like Ruby) without having to compile and link generated C code for every grammar into the interpreter.
With this approach, you could have a C extension that could load any grammar at runtime and parse it extremely fast.
C/Assembly code is orders of magnitude faster at parsing than generating eg. Ruby that does the parsing.
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AntLR can do this, although it does not work that well. I used the C backend, which is pretty directly ported from the Java backend. C-in-Java-style is pretty awkward.
ANTLR is not the same as what I am describing. ANTLR generates code in each target language: I am talking about a common runtime that all languages call into. Think of it as a "parsing VM." Using this scheme, there would be no need to have separate backends for C and Java, the only thing you'd need to port is the bindings.
Why would that be a good idea? What advantage would a just-in-time parser generator have that a static parser generator does not?
Fast parsing from any language (even slow languages like Ruby) without having to compile and link generated C code for every grammar into the interpreter.
With this approach, you could have a C extension that could load any grammar at runtime and parse it extremely fast.
C/Assembly code is orders of magnitude faster at parsing than generating eg. Ruby that does the parsing.