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…

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…

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.