Is Vala a sane language to parse, compared to C++?

Question

The problems parsing C++ are well known. It can't be parsed purely based on syntax, it can't be done as LALR (whatever the term is, i'm not a language theorist), the language spec is a zillion pages, etc. For that and other reasons I'm deciding on an alternative language for my personal projects.

Vala looks like a good language. Although providing many improvements over C++, is just as troublesome to parse? Or does it have a neat, reasonable length formal grammar, or some logical description, suitable for building parsers for compilers, source analyzers and other tools?

Whatever the answer, does that go for the Genie alternative syntax?

(I also wonder albeit less intensely about D and other post-C++ non-VM languages.)

Answer 1

C++ is one of the most complex (if not the most complex) programming language to parse in common use. Of particular difficulty is it's name lookup rules and template instantiation rules. C++ is not parsable using a LALR(1) parser (such as the parsers generated by Bison and Yacc), but it is by all means parsable (after all, people use parsers which have no problem parsing C++ every day). (In fact, early versions of G++ were built on top of Bison's Generalized LR parser framework Actually not, see comments) before it was more recently replaced with a hand written recursive descent parser)

On the other hand, I'm not sure I see what "improvements" Vala offers over C++. The languages look to attempt to accomplish the same goals. On the other hand, you're probably not going to find much outside of GTK+ written with Vala interfaces. You're going to be using C interfaces to everything else, which really defeats the point of using such a language.

If you don't like C++ due to it's complexity, it might be a good idea to consider Objective-C instead, because it is a simple extension of C, (like Vala), but has a much larger community of programmers for you to draw upon given it's foundation for everything in Mac land.

Finally, I don't see why the difficulty of parsing the language itself has to do with what a programmer should be caring about in order to use the language. Just my 2 cents.