Reusable Parser Generation from Free and Open Source Compilers

This paper describes reusable parser generation from source code of popular open source compilers for rapid parser development. It is based on the author’s experience of constructing reverse engineering tools that extract design information and draw some diagrams from programs. This took several weeks to achieve using traditional parser development. A renewal parser generator MJay was developed to improve the productivity. The syntax analysis consists of two parsers. MJay generates a first parser which is a commonly-used LALR parser from traditional grammar rules. MJay also generates other grammar rules for a second parser which has no reduce/reduce conflicts. The second parser is developed rapidly using the generated grammar rules. In experiments, it took only a few hours to develop the parsers for C# and Visual Basic by effectively using the source code of compilers and MJay.