Explore the possibility to use Irony in IronJS

[asbjornu]

Irony is an interesting library for implementing languages on the .NET platform. For its description:

Unlike most existing yacc/lex-style solutions Irony does not employ any scanner or parser code generation from grammar specifications written in a specialized meta-language. In Irony the target language grammar is coded directly in c# using operator overloading to express grammar constructs. Irony's scanner and parser modules use the grammar encoded as c# class to control the parsing process.

Some effort should be invested into exploring the possibility of using Irony to simplify IronJS.

[asbjornu]

Sprache is also an option that gets a lot of praise.

[otac0n]

Well, we do need to rewrite the parser, I believe. It seems that that is our current performance bottleneck.

Irony is made or use with C# operator overloading, and so this would pretty much require us to port the parser / compiler to C# as well.

[asbjornu]

Yea, perhaps Sprache is a better fit since it uses Linq instead of operator overloading?

[fholm]

@otac0n: Have you benchmarked and checked the fact that it's actually the parser that takes up most of the time?

[otac0n]

Well, have a look at these numbers and see if you can determine where we are so much slower:
http://blog.excastle.com/2011/10/16/net-and-coffeescript-comparing-jurassic-jint-and-ironjs/

[BrannonKing]

I've used Irony for several projects. That thing is a memory hog. I can't see it improving anyone's performance. I really liked Eto.Parse. It was fast. Unfortunately, the author wasn't very interested in providing detailed error output when the parse failed. Someone would have to contribute that.