Get the latest tech news
Prism (new Ruby parser) in 2024
In Ruby 3.3.0, a new standard library was added to CRuby called Prism. Prism is a parser for the Ruby language, exposed as both a C library (optionally usable by CRuby) and a Ruby library (usable as a Ruby gem). The Prism project represents many person-years worth of effort, and is the result of a collaboration between Shopify, CRuby core contributors, other Ruby implementation authors, and Ruby tooling developers.
Suffice to say, we believe a hand-written recursive descent parser is the best choice for a language like Ruby, and it appears from this early version of CRuby that (at least at the time) Matz agreed. Also in 2004, Ryan Davis released a library called ParseTree, which gave developers access to the CRuby syntax tree using a C extension that converted it into Ruby primitives (arrays, strings, symbols, integers, etc.). Taking into account the history of the Ruby frontend and the current state of the ecosystem, it was clear that if a single parser were going to be written, it would have to solve everything at the same time to avoid risking becoming yet another option.
Or read this on Hacker News
