re2c is a free and open-source lexer generator for C/C++, Go and Rust.
Its main goal is generating fast lexers: at least as fast as their reasonably optimized hand-coded counterparts. Instead of using traditional table-driven approach, re2c encodes the generated finite state automata directly in the form of conditional jumps and comparisons. The resulting programs are faster and often smaller than their table-driven analogues, and they are much easier to debug and understand. re2c applies quite a few optimizations in order to speed up and compress the generated code.
Another distinctive feature is its flexible interface: instead of assuming a fixed program template, re2c lets the programmer write most of the interface code and adapt the generated lexer to any particular environment.
Official re2c website is re2c.org. It has a lot of examples.
Release tarballs: https://github.com/skvadrik/re2c/releases
Source code:
$ git clone https://github.com/skvadrik/re2c.git
$ git clone https://git.code.sf.net/p/re2c/code-git
Github is the main repo, sourceforge is a mirror and can be slightly outdated.
re2c is an Open Source, community-driven project. See CONTRIBUTING.md for details about contributions to this repository.
See BUILD.md or the online docs for instructions how to build re2c.
Bugtracker:
Mailing lists:
IRC channels:
- irc.oftc.net/#re2c
- irc.libera.chat/#re2c
You are welcome to ask for help or share your thoughts and ideas.
re2c was originally written by Peter Bumbulis [email protected]. Since then many volunteers have contributed to the project. The current maintainer is Ulya Trofimovich [email protected].