Re: [toronto-lisp] October meeting minutes

Vish: Thanks for writing up the minutes.

On 10-10-07 11:54 PM, Vish Singh wrote:

• Doug talked about the state machine compiler he's using (I think it

was http://www.complang.org/ragel/)

• compiles to C code
• he uses it to build state machines for parsing HTTP streams

Yes that is it. Ragel is awesome.

In a project I'm working on I use Ragel a lot. My project doesn't have a parser for HTTP per se but it has one for /\r?\n\r?\n/ which is all you need for an HTTP 1.0 message terminator:

machine http10_message;

...

main := ( extend* $inc_count ('\r'? '\n' '\r'? '\n') @found_separator );

HTTP is only one of the message formats it parses.

I also like using Ragel for parsing command line arguments and such.

• Alex described how shared-memory concurrency can be implemented

using in-memory databases

• Antiweb uses Berkeley DB in a similar way

http://hoytech.com/transactional-programming.html

Doug