ZeParser, v2

This is a JS parser written in JS. It is blazingly faster but doesn't return you a parse tree. It's capable of parsing and validating JS on an OCD level at very high speeds.

Note that this readme is outdated and will be updated soon. Hm where have I heard that before.

More details about what the build script does can be read in this blog post

Goals

There were two goals for this project:

• Write a parser that would parse and validate JS as fast as possible, nothing else
• Write the basis for a complete parser (including parse tree)

This parser tries to be as fast as possible. That is also why it doesn't produce any kind of parse tree. It merely validates the JS.

Feel free to compare this parser to any other. At least if it is beaten, I know it's not due to a specific implementation requirement. If you can write a faster parser (in JS), I'd like to know about it!

The source code is well structured and hand optimized to heck. Unfortunately that does mean using the ord of characters in a lot of places and creating exhaustive if-else branches. Anything to postpone string comparisons (or worse) when possible.

The parser itself has no return value. If the parser doesn't throw before it finishes parsing, the parsed source code is proper JS (ES5).

Usage

Usage is simple:

var par = new Par(<input:string>, options).run();

or even simpler;

var par = Par.parse(input, options);

Tests

This parser comes with a huge set of input cases. These cases give me 100% code coverage. That doesn't mean that the parser is complete (because I might be missing a case in the suite) but I'm pretty confident that you won't easily poke a hole into it :)

The tests can be found in tests/tests.js. You can run them for the tokenizer (tests/tokenizer.html), for the parser (tests/parser.html), and for the build (tests/test-build-file.js) which can be generated by running node ./bin/build.js.

Examples

The example folder contains two html files that have an inline example of how to parse a string. In case the usage above was too complex. (Nah, just kidding. I use that to quickly debug specific cases that fail :)

src

The src folder contains the three main files; tok.js, par.js, and uni.js. The profiler.js file is used by my benchmark project, feel free to ignore it.

Results

So the result is a very fast parser. In my benchmarks it's able to gobble an 8mb test file (with various real-world JS files, like jQuery and Gmail) in an average 330ms (10 runs in the same session). That's Chrome, Linux, my (pretty high-end) machine. You will very probably get different results.

Take note that it's not fair to compare these results to other parsers out there. If I were to output even the simplest of an array containing one object per token (token stream), the speed would be quite a bit slower. Still fast, mind you, but nowhere near the 400 mark :)

The source is relatively good to read. The many (hex) numbers may be a bit intimidating, but the bigger picture of the parser is well readable. The tokenizer is well separated from the parser and the code uses an OO style that's easy to maintain and extend.

Missing

There are two things missing from this parser:

• Label validation for loops
• Strict mode checks

I've learned that continue may only jump to labels that are scoped to the current loop.

Strict mode has never been a high priority for me, but maybe some day.

Todos

• Label validation
• Refactoring OO to globals
• Use as basis for real parser
• Strict mode

Label validation is probably easy. The continue statement does not look for labels beyond the (inner most?) loop, while break does. So there's some trickery involved in getting that right as well. Right now it simply does statement scoping for labels.

The parser can be a bit faster than it is right now by refactoring the prototype based structure to a "global" based structure with regular functions and variables. In that structure no function is embedded in another function and there are virtually no property lookups (which are relatively pretty expensive). The entire process should make everything even faster :)

Portability

The code does not use any odd tricks and is (deliberately) kept basic. Not only does this aim to help browsers optimize the hell out of everything, it also helps you to port the code if you would want to do so :)

Nodejs

The parser works under Node.js, you can find a cli.js script in the bin folder. The usage is simple:

echo 'console.log("hello world!")' | node bin/cli.js

This will make the parser parse whatever you echoed and throw if bad, or do nothing if passed. This script also serves as an example how to use the parser under node.

Usages

List of (known) usages of this project:

• html lit (extend js with custom html literal syntax, also adds line number detection for source maps)
• cnjs (extend js with custom php-like class notation, see JSCN repo)
• astoo (private repo, modifies this parser so it can parse AS2)