kamadorueda / nixel Goto Github PK

One attractive feature of rnix-parser is, through its use of rowan, it is able to recover from errors and provide partial parses for input. This is especially useful in the context of editor tooling where the code is frequently invalid while it is being edited. How does nixel/santiago stack up in this respect?

We currently use GNU Bison, and it would be possible to offer this feature by using Bison's native error recovery mechanisms: https://www.gnu.org/software/bison/manual/bison.html#Error-Recovery

There are a few sensible places to recover from errors, for instance:

• Between parentheses (lists, attribute sets, etc), like '(' error ')', or
• In unfinished bindings like binds attrpath '=' error
• etc

More information in: #2

There’s already a Nix parser written in Rust at https://github.com/nix-community/rnix-parser (but from what I could see based on a very different parsing method and producing a somewhat different result), how do the two of them compare?
Do you have any benchmark or qualitative comparison?