tmbb
Elixir alternative to pygments
Is there any elixir alternative to pygments? I can’t find anything on hex. The core is obviously very easy to port, but the real work is in porting all the lexers. It’s probably very easy too, but tedious and repetitive, and to be properly done it probably requires at least a cursory knowledge of the programming language the lexer is highlighting.
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tmbb
Thanks, but I’ve already written my pure elixir version of pygments:
It only has two lexers right now (elixir and HTML), but I’ll keep adding the in the future and write some docs so that you can contribute your own.
My approach is technically superior to Pygments, and can do more interesting things (like highlighting matching delimiters or do ... end blocks). This is becaus I use a real PEG parser instead of the Regex approach taken by Pygments.
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tmbb
An alternative is to copy what haskell has done. They’ve got a library that parses kate syntax XML highlighting files and generates lexers from them at compile time. The format of the XML files is quite simple, but most of the XML files are LGPL, which is probably too restrictive for most people.
Another alternative is to parse textmate’s syntax highlighting files, but their grammar is more confusing because they do funny things with regexs…
tmbb
The obvious answer is that yes, you can port the lexers as long as you port the Python code to Elixir.
The practical answer is: Yes, but you have to rewrite the weird Pygments’ state-machines into a grammar for a PEG parser (which is way simpler than the original state-machines.
The crazy answer is that tah Pygments lexers are somewhat data-driven, if you squint a little (a lot), so it’s probably possible to write a Python program that compiles most of the Lexers into Elixir. Writing such program would be highly non-trivial, and my library is technically superior (and more powerful) than Pygments in a fundamental way, so I think that it’s better to just port the lexers.
I’d like to write a guide on how to write the lexers and crowdsource it to the polyglot members of the Elixir community, but I have no time for that now…
tmbb
The elixir lexer had some problems too. I’ve corrected them in my implementation. Pygments in general is not a very good piece of software. The real killer feature of pygments is the enormous number of man-hours put into writing lexers for all those languages. The lexers themselves are not necessarily very good.
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