148754 2015-09-03 15:30:29 -0700 Migrate from flex/bison -> boost::spirit or similar 2015-09-08 14:43:15 -0700 1 1 1 Unclassified WebKit WebCore Misc. WebKit Nightly Build All All RESOLVED INVALID P2 Normal --- 1 bfulgham bfulgham achristensen ap benjamin bfulgham mjs sam oldest_to_newest 1123187 0 bfulgham 2015-09-03 15:30:29 -0700 The Flex and Bison parser generators are becoming an every increasing maintenance burden: 1. More recent versions of this software have undesirable GPL v3 licensing. 2. Different platforms have access to different versions of the software (e.g., Mac is limited to Bison 2.3) 3. Flex and Bison are difficult to obtain and use on Windows. Instead, it would be nice to move towards a more modern parser generator approach, possibly using something like Boost::spirit. 1123189 1 bfulgham 2015-09-03 15:31:35 -0700 The first question I have is whether the parsers produced by Boost::Spirit are known to have comparable performance to Flex/Bison? 1124392 2 achristensen 2015-09-08 14:22:55 -0700 I also wonder if we'd have to include a copy of all of boost to be able to use spirit. 1124401 3 bfulgham 2015-09-08 14:43:15 -0700 (In reply to comment #2) > I also wonder if we'd have to include a copy of all of boost to be able to > use spirit. Either that, or add it to the build requirements. Either way, it seems like a similar burden to getting a usable Flex/Bison setup. So perhaps this project is a waste of time. If Visual Studio or Xcode shipped with some version of boost, we could perhaps use it, but it seem like this is not going to work.