Plurrrr

One of the most interesting emergent properties of the Rust language has been the desire and ability to push more and more information into the type system. Other programming languages allow this, but Rust’s combination of speed, safety, and extremely powerful compile-time computation through both types and macros, have lead to a large ecosystem of highly capable libraries that do much of their work before the program ever runs.

Recent developments in the type system are making it easier than ever for programmers to take advantage of that power, and things are only going to get more interesting.

The Parser in CPython is currently a PEG (Parser Expression Grammar) parser. The first version of the parser used to be an LL(1) based parser that was one of the oldest parts of CPython implemented before it was replaced by PEP 617. In particular, both the current parser and the old LL(1) parser are the output of a parser generator. This means that the way the parser is written is by feeding a description of the Grammar of the Python language to a special program (the parser generator) which outputs the parser. The way the Python language is changed is therefore by modifying the grammar file and developers rarely need to interact with the parser generator itself other than use it to generate the parser.

Go’s place between C and Python in terms of abstraction and garbage collection memory management model has made it attractive to programmers looking for a fast but reasonably high level language. However, there is no free lunch. Go’s abstractions, especially with regards to allocation, come with a cost. This article will show ways to measure and reduce this cost.