Boost.Spirit

The year 2009 came to an end. This is reason enough to have a look at the statistics collected for our new website and to publish a list of the most popular posts and articles. I will use the number of hits as a metric of popularity. But since we created this new website only in November all statistics will be based on the hits collected over the last two month only.

The most popular post was Joel’s note about his plans to Build a Compiler. This post got the most attention in terms of comments as well. Many people seem to be interested in seeing how to utilize Spirit for more complex things.

The second most popular article was The Magical Power of Attributes – Primitives, which is a first in a series of three articles highlighting Spirit’s new capabilities related to attributes. I’m planning to continue to write this style of articles in the future, so their popularity is a big encouragement for me.

The third in the row of popular articles was the list of Who is using Spirit. As it turns out, Spirit gained quite some track record in the community over the last years. We are very proud of this impressive list and would like to thank everybody for their support! And, by the way, if you want to see your project in this list, just leave a comment there, we will happily add the information.

I’m very happy to see that the articles showing how to use Spirit for specific tasks draw a lot of attention as well. The next three in the row of popular articles are: Parsing a List of Key-Value Pairs Using Spirit.Qi, Creating Your Own Parser Component for Spirit.Qi, and Generate Escaped String Output Using Spirit.Karma. It seems that’s definitely something we will have to continue in the future.

Again, on behalf of Joel and myself, let me express our gratitude for all the support we received over the last time. We have a lot of ideas how to improve Spirit and we will need your help in the future. Stay tuned!

Happy new year to you all!

How about some trivia…

So you know BNF (Backus-Naur Form or originally Backus Normal Form) and EBNF (Extended Backus-Naur Form). But did you know Panini’s grammar? It defined Sanskrit using a variety of formal techniques including recursion, transformations, and metarules. That was around 500 B.C.!

See this link. And this.

We are trying to get the best possible content to you by regularly publishing articles about different aspects of the new Spirit V2.1 library (released with Boost 1.41). Now we need your feedback! Sure, you already can leave comments, but we thought it might be cool to add the possibility to rate the quality of the articles. So just click the stars at the end of a post to tell us what you think. Moreover, we added thumbs up/down rating for comments. That’s an easy way for you to agree or disagree with other user’s opinions. Use it!

And, by the way, it would be helpful if you rated the older articles as well.