Marpa will parse anything that can be written in BNF

I've been aware of Marpa since about 2010. Every once in a while I read whatever Kegler has written, and I come away from it each time unconvinced that I should put in the effort to use it (which, for the most part, means first porting it to another language). On the plus side, he does acknowledge some of the prior art in the field. But on the flip side, he makes expansive claims, and there has been essentially zero uptake of Marpa or even its ideas, as far as I am aware.

Does Marpa live up to its advertising? Is it more generally useful than GLR or GLL (which, despite having some flurry of effort in the past decade, themselves have not set the parsing world on fire). It's frustrating, because the parsing world has gone around in circles for many years now (PEG being a great example). It would be nice to have algorithms with superior parsing power that are at least as fast as the less powerful ones used by virtually everyone today.

Regrettably, I've not yet seen Marpa ported from Perl. The C core `libmarpa` is only part of it.

The most recent effort I've noticed is the Rust marpa and libmarpa-sys crates, but they've seemingly been inactive for a year.

It might be interesting to attempt a port to language like Julia, both dynamically expressive, and with a good C ffi. Just to get a feel for the level of difficulty. Though I've a many-years-old very fuzzy recollection that the test coverage was worrisome.

Even by the "shoemaker's children have no shoes" standard of our profession, the state of parsing can disappoint.