Welcome to Spirit

Spirit is a set of C++ libraries for parsing and output generation implemented as Domain Specific Embedded Languages (DSEL) using Expression templates and Template Meta-Programming. The Spirit libraries enable a target grammar to be written exclusively in C++. Inline grammar specifications can mix freely with other C++ code and, thanks to the generative power of C++ templates, are immediately executable.

Spirit is part of Boost Libraries, a peer-reviewed, open collaborative development effort.

Dec ’10 03

Using Boost.Spirit V2: Qi and Karma

By Joel de Guzman Beginner, BoostCon 2010, User Experience 6 Comments »

These are links to the slides and video of Michael Caisse’s BoostCon 2010 talk:

slides: <http://www.objectmodelingdesigns.com/boostcon10/>
video: <http://blip.tv/file/4143337 >

Enjoy!

Machinery, sensors, equipment, client/server communications, even file formats… Parsing and producing communication streams is everywhere you look. Often these tasks are simple or small enough to tempt ad-hoc solutions. The Spirit 2.1 library provides a model that is simple enough to tackle those “quick hacks” and easily scales for full-featured AST generation.

This session will explore real-life experiences with the parser and generator (Qi/Karma) portions of the Spirit library. As we look at various small and medium-sized parsers/generators employed in various products we will establish some “rules-of-thumb” and guidelines for tackling the parser/generator domain with Qi/Karma. The session will end with the implementation of a usable XML parser and a simplified XPath-like node extractor.

The session will include some lecture and a lot of tutorial. Attendees will walk away with the knowledge and tools to begin parsing and generating with Spirit Qi/Karma.

—Michael Caisse

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Nov ’10 13

Parsing Escaped String Input Using Spirit.Qi

By Hartmut Kaiser Beginner, Intermediate, Qi Example No Comments »

Jeroen Habraken (a.k.a VeXocide) sent an article about parsing escaped strings using Qi, which we happily publish for everybody to read. Thanks Jeroen!

Continue reading here.

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Nov ’10 07

Multi-threaded Qi: 6 hours -> 37 seconds

By Joel de Guzman Mailing List, User Experience 8 Comments »

The Spirit mailing list is still the place where active discussion takes place. I will be posting some excerpts from the mailing list here every once in a while. Here’s an interesting post from Leo Goodstadt:
Are Qi parsers thread-safe?

The answer of course is yes

I have been trying to speed up some parsing code going through around 25 GB of data. This had been taking up 6 hours using Python code. Re-writing it using Qi had taken it down to 4 minutes. And finally, with the help of Intel Threading Building Blocks, I am down to 37 seconds or a > 500x speedup!
Continue reading »

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Oct ’10 14

Joel de Guzman, Hartmut Kaiser: Spirit: History and Evolution

By Joel de Guzman Beginner, BoostCon 2010, General 3 Comments »

Care about how Spirit got started? Here’s a link to our BoostCon 2010 presentation:

http://blip.tv/file/4245756

This year, we celebrate Spirit’s 10th anniversary from its early beginnings as an offshoot from a much larger GUI library in the 90s and debuted into Boost in May 2001 in the typical “Is there interest in this library?” fashion like all would be Boost libraries. From a humble 7 header file library, Spirit has grown to be one of the most sophisticated Boost libraries and along the way became the incubator of other Boost libraries such as Boost.Fusion, Boost.Phoenix, and Boost.Wave and played a significant role for Boost.Proto getting mature.
We would like to present Spirit (and the libraries it inspired) in a historical perspective. The presentation will aim to provide a lighter, more intimate perspective into the development of at least 4 libraries with almost a decade’s worth of experience being Boost authors and bonafide crazy template metaprogrammers who abuse operators like Mad Scientists. Of course, we can’t help it if we show off some C++ tricks here and there, but we’ll try to keep it as light as we can.

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Jul ’10 23

Phoenix3 GSOC project

By Joel de Guzman Uncategorized 4 Comments »

Thomas Heller has just completed the Phoenix Proto port. Another successful GSOC project!

I’ve been mentoring for GSOC for a couple of years now. This one is the best (the Fusion 0x project of last year’s GSOC was also highly successful, but it was Hartmut Kaiser who mentored that). Thomas is an amazing student! A++, if there’s such a thing.

Continue reading »

Jun ’10 23

Best Practices

By Joel de Guzman Uncategorized No Comments »

We have a new page enumerating the best practices for using Spirit. Right now, there’s only one entry (update: there may be more by the time you read this), but as time goes by, we will be filling this page with more. If you have a short Spirit tip to share, this is the page. Add a comment and we’ll incorporate them.

See the “Best Practices” page here.

Jun ’10 18

I Love my Spirit T-shirt

By Joel de Guzman Uncategorized No Comments »

Spirit-shirt frontAwesomeness…

Michael Caisse of Object Modeling Designs designed this cool Spirit inspired T-shirt. I love it so much. If you like Spirit as much as we do, you can get one from Michael here: http://objectmodelingdesigns.com/swag.html

May ’10 16

Spirit: History and Evolution

By Hartmut Kaiser BoostCon 2010 4 Comments »

Yes, we were tempted to call our second BoostCon talk ‘Design and Evolution’, but we decided to to be modest. We wanted to give a very brief overview of the way Spirit has evolved over the last decade. While talking about a period of time this long in 90 minutes has to be very brief we nevertheless tried to highlight the main stepping stones and milestones in Spirits development. For me, developing the slides for ‘Spirit: History and Evolution’ was real fun: looking through ancient email archives, re-reading key private conversations, and realizing that most of the ideas implemented today have been already in place from the early years. All of this was exciting. To some extent, this even turned out to be educational.

I have to admit I was not sure how people would react to this kind of talk. It was not one of the usual, sophisticated, well thought through, and cutting edge presentations normally seen at BoostCon. This talk was merely a conversation with the attendees about Boost’s history guided by Spirits evolution. In the end I was relieved to see people reacted positively. Some came to me afterwards saying they enjoyed listening. For all of you not being at BoostCon, here are the slides: Spirit: History and Evolution.

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May ’10 13

Using Spirit V2: Qi and Karma

By Hartmut Kaiser BoostCon 2010 10 Comments »

Michael Caisse (of Object Modeling Designs), some of you will know him from the Freenode #boost IRC channel, presented his talk about Spirit at BoostCon 2010 last Tuesday. I personally very much like listening to his knowledgeable and entertaining presentations. Apparently many people do so as well, the room he presented in was overfull. People even sat on the floor as all seats were taken. So in case you are interested – here is a link to his slides: Using Spirit V2: Qi and Karma.

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May ’10 11

A Framework for RAD Spirit

By Hartmut Kaiser BoostCon 2010, Build a Compiler 13 Comments »

Finally, yesterday was the day! Joel and I presented the current status of our work related to the ‘Writing a Compiler’ effort. We submitted this talk to BoostCon 2010 and got accepted back in January. Having to present at BoostCon just put a nice pressure onto us to get moving and to start working on the project. I don’t want to go into any detail about the presentation itself. This will be done in future articles to be published after BoostCon. I just wanted to provide a link to the slides for those interested in having a look. Ok, here we go: A Framework for RAD Spirit, grab it while it’s hot!

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May ’10 08

Next Week is BoostCon Week!

By Hartmut Kaiser BoostCon 2010, Build a Compiler No Comments »

Finally, the long wait and the preparations for BoostCon 2010 are over. The last weeks were dominated by writing the code and creating the slides for our talk ‘A Framework for RAD Spirit‘. Regular readers of this site probably have already wondered why we have been inactive here since mid-March. Well, that is mainly because of preparing for BoostCon turned out to be too time consuming to leave any room for writing posts and articles.

Continue reading »

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Mar ’10 11

S-expressions and variant

By Joel de Guzman Build a Compiler, Qi Example 31 Comments »

I have a mixed relationship with variant…

I just wrote a parser for S-expressions (that will be the basis of ASTs and intermediate types in my planned “write-a-compiler” article series). The parser itself is easy, but as always, I spent more time on the underlying data structures.

Continue reading »

Mar ’10 09

Integer to String Conversion: Karma fastest again

By Hartmut Kaiser General, User Experience 23 Comments »

Tino Didriksin published yet another speed comparison of different ways to convert an integer into a string (see his blog A howl on the Wind…). And again, Karma turns out to be the leader of the pack by being upto 10 times faster than the other tested methods. This nicely supports our own measurements (see here). Thanks Tino!

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Mar ’10 05

Tracking the Input Position While Parsing

By Peter Schüller Advanced, Beginner, Qi Example Comments Off

The following article is about tracking the parsing position with Spirit V2. This is useful for generating error messages which tell the user exactly where an error has occurred. We also show how to use Spirit V2 to parse from an input stream without first reading the whole stream into a std::string.

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Mar ’10 03

The Anatomy of Semantic Actions in Qi

By Hartmut Kaiser Beginner, General, Tip of the Day 10 Comments »

The concept of Spirit’s semantic actions seems to be easy enough to understand as most people new to the library prefer their usage over applying the built-in attribute propagation rules. That is not surprising. The idea of attaching a function to any point of a grammar which is called whenever the corresponding parser matched is straighforward to grasp. Earlier versions of Spirit required a semantic action to conform to a very specific interface. Today’s semantic actions are more flexible and more powerful. Recently, a couple of people asked questions about them. So I decided dedicating this Tip of the Day to the specifics and the usage model of semantic actions in Spirit Qi.

Continue reading »

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