Irony - .NET Language Implementation Kit. | Hacker News Reader

Irony - .NET Language Implementation Kit.

irony.codeplex.com

39 pointsmmavnn11 comments

This saved me an awful lot of time recently.

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This looks cool, but it appears to be on hold:

http://irony.codeplex.com/Thread/View.aspx?ThreadId=230812

It is, but as mentioned in the same thread the parser side of things is pretty complete and quite robust already.

It's also a nicely written piece of code if you need to dig in and change anything.

Finally, the fact it's MIT licensed means you can just lift and use the code as a basis if needed.

Just to note: I'm not affiliated with the project in anyway, but it did save me an unreasonable amount of time recently.

So I thought I'd spread the joy.

This does look pretty interesting. I'd be interested in seeing someone do a writeup of various parser toolkits for .NET. I feel like I'm out of date with what people are doing given I hadn't heard of this one before.

So, Americans won't get Irony?

Guessing nationality from names is always risky, but I don't think the author is American :-)

Here are some very interesting comments from the author:

I guess with MS killing DLR and Iron languages, that puts more pressure on us, as I think this leaves Irony as the only ongoing technology for parser/interpreter construction in .NET. DLR, in my humble opinion, had never had a slight chance to become mainstream - it's just too complex, and benefits (like performance) are non-existent.

there are other gaping holes in .NET technology, which are screaming "fix me!", and which are more relevant to biz app programmer like myself. Entity framework and LightSwitch are jokes and don't even deserve any serious discussion. That's what I'm trying to do now - fill the void, and sorry to those who work in areas where parsers are more important than anything else.

I don't know why the author thinks that there aren't any other parser/interpreters for .NET; I'll grant that there aren't many, but ANTLR still supports C#, and I've been using fslex/fsyacc recently (found in the F# PowerPack). There's also FParsec if you prefer a parser-combinator approach.

What makes him tell that MS is killing the DLR and Iron languages ?

From my understanding both got funded by MS then passed on the community (the IronRuby mailing list is pretty active these days), but I wouldn't say MS killed these projects.

Not at all. IronPython is alive and well and (as I understand it) MS' bet for embedded scripting (at least, that's what they're recommending).

Embedding the grammar directly into a language through operator overloading is similar to Boost.Spirit's approach: http://boost-spirit.com/home/

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