Tuesday, June 12, 2012

Language-ObjC released

I have uploaded a new package to hackage, language-objc.  This package provides an AST, parser, and pretty-printer for Objective-C.  It's a fork of the excellent language-c package, so if you're familiar with that you should be able to pick up language-objc pretty quickly.

Source repository is on github.

If you "cabal unpack language-objc; cd language-objc-0.4.2.0/examples/", there are a number of examples that can get you started.  For the truly impatient:

import Language.ObjC
import qualified Data.ByteString.Char8 as B

-- parsing bytestrings
objcTranslUnit = B.pack "int a=0;"

errOrAST = parseC objcTranslUnit nopos

-- parsing from a file
fileAST sourceFile = do
    result <- parseCFile (newGCC "gcc") Nothing [] sourceFile
    return $ either (error . show) id result
A few things to note:
  1. Input files must be preprocessed.  'parseCFile' will do this for you.  Non-preprocessed source can only be parsed in very limited situations (did you know that 'id' is a typedef?  And 'id' is also commonly used as an identifier to methods/functions, even in system libraries, so it can't be a keyword?).
  2. The objective-C extensions have only been lightly tested, but I think most of the core functionality works.  I am unaware of a full specification for the language, which makes it difficult to say if it's complete.
  3. Most of the code in Language.ObjC.Analysis is not yet compatible with Objective-C extensions.
  4. One difference from language-c is that certain GNU attributes can no longer be parsed due to grammar ambiguities.
  5. Attempting to compile at -O2 requires a lot of memory due to the giant Happy parser that's produced.

I am most grateful to Benedikt Huber, Manuel Chakravarty, Duncan Coutts, Bertram Felgenhauer, and all contributors to language-c, as they're responsible for most of the code.  Bugs are mine.  Comments and patches welcome.

1 comment:

  1. Really awesome! I've been wanting to start this myself, but the huge amount of work kept me from doing it. Very impressed!

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