Making an AST in Go

Asked Aug 05 '20 at 19:42

Active Aug 05 '20 at 19:42

Viewed 748 times

I'm writing a parser for a custom language in go. My problem is that each node on the syntax tree is different based on it's type (be it an if or a variableDef or a funcDef) and thus has different values, but I need to have pointers that can point at any of them, to give it treeish functionality.

Someone suggested having an interface, with something like a describe method (implementation-dependent) that described the node, but then the problem is that it'll return different things based on the node that is it. (A funcDef would give args []variableDef and body []node, but an if would give cond bin and body []node, and a variable def would have type typ and name string)

I originally wrote this in JS and used the flexibility of JSON to my advantage. I have heard that Go has built-in JSON support but I don't think i want to go down that route.

asked Aug 05 '20 at 19:42

onetesseract

Take a look at this: https://golang.org/pkg/go/ast/ – Burak Serdar Aug 05 '20 at 19:47
@BurakSerdar correct me if i'm wrong, but I think that's a package for parsing _Go_ modules, and not really what I want – onetesseract Aug 05 '20 at 19:50
1

Correct. But it also contains the ast for go, and you can implement something similar for yourself. – Burak Serdar Aug 05 '20 at 19:55
1

For instance: https://golang.org/src/go/ast/ast.go?s=1405:1446#L29 shows an example interface for Expression nodes. – Burak Serdar Aug 05 '20 at 19:57

Making an AST in Go

0 Answers0