Has anyone checked out Spirit (and for that matter, Boost)?

Spirit (http://spirit.sourceforge.net/) appears to be an incredibly
powerful parser generator that allows you to specify the syntax
with the semantics... along the lines of embedding the documentation
in the code.

Yes, I know about ANTLR... which is an excellent step in the right
direction, and I have been using it for years.  But Spirit appears
to take this one step further.

Has anyone thought about porting it to D?
While I'm here, what about porting FLTK to D?
Also, anyone looking at supporting embedded processors with D?

I ask because I don't want to duplicate effort.
Thanks!
-- Glenn Lewis

Glenn M. Lewis wrote:
> Has anyone checked out Spirit (and for that matter, Boost)?
> 
> Spirit (http://spirit.sourceforge.net/) appears to be an incredibly
> powerful parser generator that allows you to specify the syntax
> with the semantics... along the lines of embedding the documentation
> in the code.
> 
> Yes, I know about ANTLR... which is an excellent step in the right
> direction, and I have been using it for years.  But Spirit appears
> to take this one step further.

I've done something somewhat like Spirit for D already, though it's admittedly much weaker and slower due to its use of polymorphism instead of expression templates. (it's part of Apropos: <http://andy.tadan.us/d>)

D's templates, lacking argument deduction, probably aren't up to the task of doing what Boost.Spirit does and I'm not sure it would be very useful anyway: even moderately complex Spirit parsers take eons to compile, and heaven help you if there's an error in it somewhere!

> While I'm here, what about porting FLTK to D?
> Also, anyone looking at supporting embedded processors with D?

Both are untouched by human hands, as far as I know. :)

 -- andy

Glenn M. Lewis wrote:
> While I'm here, what about porting FLTK to D?

Yea, that'd be awesome. FLTK rocks, allows RAD, and is crossplatform. I wonder why it hasn't caught on more like GTK and QT have?