September 25th, 2008
New projects
OK, I’ve hinted and talked about in several contexts that I have some projects going on that haven’t been announced. So today I’m going to just mention two of them (so that they will be released at some point). (And no, ioke won’t be on this list).
Xample
This one I have real hopes for. It’s already functioning to a degree. So what does it do? Well, I call it example-driven DSLs. Instead of writing a parser/regexps for handling external DSLs, Xample will take some examples and then derive code to do something based on those examples. It’s one of those things that will not do everything, but it might solve 80% of all the simple DSLs. Those cases where the overhead of creating the DSL framework would not be worth it. Xample will help in those cases in making it really easy to create quite sophisticated DSLs. It’s in Ruby, and I have plans that include a generic work bench for handling these DSLs. Since you have examples of how they should look, you can use the information in all kinds of cool ways.
I have just made the Xample repository public on github.
Antlr-ELisp
This is probably one of the worst cases of yak shaving I’ve ever started on. But it’s a good and worthwhile project. And now that I’ve mentioned it to Terence I guess there’s no way of getting away from it… =)
So, simple, Antlr-ELisp is a backend for Antlr, that allows you to create parsers for Emacs Lisp. This should make it quite easy to get Emacs modes written for a language, without having to resort to all the awful hacks Emacs generally does to handle different languages. This one is really in the infant stage right now, but it looks like it shouldn’t be too hard. Of course I’m not sure what performance will be like, but I’m trying to use as much macros as possible so the low level operations can still be efficient without looking ugly.
This project is also on github right now.
So, now I’m stuck – talking about these things on my blog means I will actually have to get both of them to a release, really soon now!
