One thing leads to another. I wanted to learn a new language
and chose Crystal. To practice, I rewrote my standard practice
project, Nicoletta, a static site generator.
That brought to mind doit a task/dataflow
library, which made me want to implement something similar, so
I wrote Croupier which
went well, so I said "Why not write a more serious SSG, which
is Nicolino which I
think would not be complete without a feature from Nikola which
I stole from Hugo, called shortcodes. So I had to write a
shortcode parser.
What are shortcodes?
Sort of macros for markdown. You want to do a <figure> but
markdown doesn't have it, so you do this:
{{% figure src="http://whatever" %}}
And you end up with a figure tag in your document.
That is done by passing data like that "src" argument and the
context of the document you are writing into a template, which
renders a piece of HTML, that's inserted where the shortcode was
and bob's your uncle.
There are variants, and details, and subtleties, but that's the
basic idea.
The bad news was that I was not the author of Nikola's current
shortcode parser, that was someone else, and I really don't
understant their code.
So I wanted to write it from scratch.
I have been wanting to learn ragel
for a bit, let's say 10 years. It's a thing that takes a finite state
machine description in a DSL and turns it into a parser in the language
you want.
As long as you want one of the languages it likes, which is not Crystal,
so I used it to generate it in C. And wrapped that in Crystal.
So, that's a very long way to say that I wrote a Shortcode parser library
that can be used from Crystal and from C, and since it can be used from
C, it can be used from pretty much any language.
It doesn't implement the whole shortcode "specification" (which is not
a real thing that exists) but it implements the basics.
Now, I just need to use it in Nicolino, and eventually make it
better as needed.
BTW: Ragel rocks.