Bug 148754

Summary:	Migrate from flex/bison -> boost::spirit or similar
Product:	WebKit	Reporter:	Brent Fulgham <bfulgham>
Component:	WebCore Misc.	Assignee:	Brent Fulgham <bfulgham>
Status:	RESOLVED INVALID
Severity:	Normal	CC:	achristensen, ap, benjamin, bfulgham, mjs, sam
Priority:	P2
Version:	WebKit Nightly Build
Hardware:	All
OS:	All

Description Brent Fulgham 2015-09-03 15:30:29 PDT

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.

Comment 1 Brent Fulgham 2015-09-03 15:31:35 PDT

The first question I have is whether the parsers produced by Boost::Spirit are known to have comparable performance to Flex/Bison?

Comment 2 Alex Christensen 2015-09-08 14:22:55 PDT

I also wonder if we'd have to include a copy of all of boost to be able to use spirit.

Comment 3 Brent Fulgham 2015-09-08 14:43:15 PDT

(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.