boost-spirit

In several questions I've seen recommendations for the Spirit parser-generator framework from boost.org , but then in the comments there is grumbling from people using Spirit who are not happy. Will those people please stand forth and explain to the rest of us what are the drawbacks or downsides to using Spirit? It is a quite cool idea, and I liked it; it was especially useful to really learn how to use C++ templates. But their documentation recommends the usage of spirit for small to medium-size parsers. A parser for a full language would take ages to compile. I will list three reasons.

I am using Spirit Qi as my parser, to parse mathematical expressions into an expression tree. I keep track of such things as the types of the symbols which are encountered as I parse, and which must be declared in the text I am parsing. Namely, I am parsing Bertini input files , a simple-ish example of which is here , a complicated example is here , and for completeness purposes, as below: %input: our first input file variable_group x,y; function f,g; f = x^2 - 1; g = y^2 - 4; END; The grammar I have been working on will ideally find declaration statements, and then parse the following comma

I want to read a CSV into a struct : struct data { std::string a; std::string b; std::string c; } However, I want to read even empty string to ensure all values are in their proper place. I adapted the struct to a boost::fusion, so the following works : // Our parser (using a custom skipper to skip comments and empty lines ) template <typename Iterator, typename skipper = comment_skipper<Iterator> > struct google_parser : qi::grammar<Iterator, addressbook(), skipper> { google_parser() : google_parser::base_type(contacts, "contacts") { using qi::eol; using qi::eps; using qi::_1; using qi::_val;

I am trying (yet) to populate several vectors with data parsed from a log. The key is do it as fast and efficient as possible, so I would like to collect all the data in only one pass (not "or" between rules). I have found the next problems: 1) Every time I use spirit and it does not work as expected I find myself totally loss and trying test and error for two hours. Is there any debug directive that gives some hint about what has gone wrong? 2) Is it valid the way I use phoenix construct? I mean, can it be used as I have done in code for avoiding using a symbol table? 3) Is there any way of

I was toying with Boost.Spirit X3 calculator example when I encountered an error I couldn't get my head around. I minimized the program to reduce complexity still throwing the same error. Say I want to parse an input as a list of statements (strings) followed by a delimiter (';'). This is my structure: namespace client { namespace ast { struct program { std::list<std::string> stmts; }; }} BOOST_FUSION_ADAPT_STRUCT(client::ast::program, (std::list<std::string>, stmts) ) The grammar is as follows: namespace client { namespace grammar { x3::rule<class program, ast::program> const program("program