PEG at the Core Developer Sprint

This week I’m not showing any new code for the parser generator I’ve described it the previous parts. Instead, I’ll try to describe what I did at the Core Developer Sprint last week before it all evaporates from my memory. Most of this relates to in PEG one way or another. Then I’ll show some code anyway, because I like to talk about code, and it roughly shows the path I see to a PEG-based parser for CPython 3.9.

[This is part 9 of my PEG series. See the Series Overview for the rest.]

Every year for the past four years a bunch of Python core developers get together for a week-long sprint at an exotic location. These sprints are sponsored by the PSF as well as by the company hosting the sprint. The first two years were hosted by Facebook in Mountain View, last year was Microsoft’s turn in Bellevue, and this year’s sprint was hosted by Bloomberg in London. (I have to say that Bloomberg’s office looks pretty cool.) Kudos to core dev Pablo Galindo Salgado for organizing!

Over 30 core devs attended this time, as well as two hopefuls. People worked on many different projects, from 3.8 release blockers to new PEPs. I hope that the PSF will publish a blog post with our accomplishments. One of the highlights was that the number of open PRs was pushed below 1000, merging over 100 PRs that had been waiting for some love from a core dev reviewer. There was even a friendly contest with a leaderboard showing the top 10 attendees who merged the most pull requests submitted by others.

For me, the main reason to attend events like this is always meeting people with whom I collaborate online all year long but whom I only get to see once or twice a year. This sprint was in Europe, so we saw a slightly different mix of core devs, and that was particularly important. Regardless, I also did quite a bit of hacking, and that’s what I’ll focus on below.

Most of my coding time at the sprint I worked with Pablo and Emily Morehouse on the PEG-based parser generator that I hope will some day replace the current pgen based parser generator. This isn’t the same code as the generator I’ve been blogging about, but it’s pretty similar. Pablo had contributed to this version already.

The first day of the sprint, Monday, I spent mostly on part 7 and 8 of this series. Originally I planned to publish all the material in a single post, but at the end of the day I wasn’t quite finished, so I cut things in two and posted the first half, on making a…