parser-prism

This is an early experiment in building the whitequark/parser gem's syntax tree using the prism parser.

Installation

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem "parser-prism"

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install parser-prism

Usage

The parser gem provides multiple parsers to support different versions of the Ruby grammar. This includes all of the Ruby versions going back to 1.8, as well as third-party parsers like MacRuby and RubyMotion. The parser-prism gem provides another parser that uses the prism parser to build the syntax tree.

You can use the prism parser like you would any other. After requiring the parser, you should be able to call any of the regular Parser::Base APIs that you would normally use.

require "parser/prism"

Parser::Prism.parse_file("path/to/file.rb")

RuboCop

To run RuboCop using the parser-prism gem as the parser, you will need to require the parser/prism/rubocop file. This file injects prism into the known options for both rubocop and rubocop-ast, such that you can specify it in your .rubocop.yml file. Unfortunately rubocop doesn't support any direct way to do this, so we have to get a bit hacky.

First, set the TargetRubyVersion in your RuboCop configuration file to 80_82_73_83_77.33. This is the version of Ruby that prism reports itself as. (The leading numbers are the ASCII values for PRISM.)

AllCops:
  TargetRubyVersion: 80_82_73_83_77.33

Now when you run rubocop you will need to require the parser/prism/rubocop file before executing so that it can inject the prism parser into the known options.

bundle exec ruby -rparser/prism/rubocop $(bundle exec which rubocop)

This should run RuboCop using the prism parser.

Benchmarks

As a whole, this parser should be significantly faster than the parser gem. The bin/bench script in this repository compares the performance of Parser::CurrentRuby and Parser::Prism. Running against a large file like lib/parser/prism/compiler.rb yields:

Warming up --------------------------------------
 Parser::CurrentRuby     1.000  i/100ms
       Parser::Prism     6.000  i/100ms
Calculating -------------------------------------
 Parser::CurrentRuby     16.642  (± 0.0%) i/s -     84.000  in   5.052021s
       Parser::Prism     64.951  (± 3.1%) i/s -    330.000  in   5.088147s

Comparison:
       Parser::Prism:       65.0 i/s
 Parser::CurrentRuby:       16.6 i/s - 3.90x  slower

When running with --yjit, the comparison is even more stark:

Warming up --------------------------------------
 Parser::CurrentRuby     1.000  i/100ms
       Parser::Prism     9.000  i/100ms
Calculating -------------------------------------
 Parser::CurrentRuby     20.062  (± 0.0%) i/s -    101.000  in   5.034389s
       Parser::Prism    112.823  (± 9.7%) i/s -    558.000  in   5.009460s

Comparison:
       Parser::Prism:      112.8 i/s
 Parser::CurrentRuby:       20.1 i/s - 5.62x  slower

These benchmarks were run on a single laptop without a lot of control for other processes, so take them with a grain of salt.

Development

Run rake test to run the tests. This runs tests exported from the parser gem into their own fixture files.

Contributing

Bug reports and pull requests are welcome on GitHub at https://github.com/kddnewton/parser-prism.

License

The gem is available as open source under the terms of the MIT License.