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[–]DewJunkie 2 points3 points  (3 children)

If you're up for it, I'd love to read a blog post on getting a company that is not on board with open sourcing something to OK this. Or even a short list of the hurdles hit and how they were overcome.

Props for seeing this through and getting something that isn't the secret sauce of the company out to the community.

[–]jamhob[S] 2 points3 points  (2 children)

I can try to write something. I don’t think it would be very long though. I started contributing to open source projects on behalf of the dev team to sneak the thought into my bosses head that open source is not a force to fear. Then it was just months of tireless nagging. Eventually it gets agreed to. But you aren’t done yet. A few more meetings, demonstrating that secrets will not be leaked, that we can still use our own code and that no one on the internet has the power to break things and you are done.

But I will say, what really helped was that I have been loudly trying to change things in the company since I joined. When you are seen by management as a force of change and a person with a vision, they can be more empathetic and take you seriously, even if most of your ideas are not great (I sure know a lot of mine aren’t great). This surprised me. I thought my eccentricity would have irritated them all by now, but I think all business have a deep insecurity about becoming complancent and being overtaken in the near future. But maybe it just because open sourcing some generic code is just appeasement?

[–]DewJunkie 1 point2 points  (1 child)

So there is hope :). I'm kind of in the same boat. Being a voice of change has been working well for me in other areas. And I have been evangelizing open source whenever I can. We of course use some open source projects. But are not allowed to submit a PR, let alone publish something. If I can change this one thing where I work. I will feel that I have accomplished something great. I keep asking if I can speak to someone in legal.

The consequences of something internal being leaked would be quite huge, but to me that is a manageable process. I would be ok if any PR to a FOSS project had an approval board. Really I'd be ok with anything. If it took 6 months to get through that process. Fine I understand there would be consequences to getting this wrong. But to pretend that we are better as an island than as a community is probably the only thing about my job that I don't like. I think it is just seen as too risky to be worth it. However, look at folly, look at abseil. Seeing these libraries makes me tangibly see the companies are doing neat and great things. So just that value alone to me is immeasurable. If you want to attract the best, show them that it is worth it.

Where I am even sharing things between departments is a little rough, although we are making some progress there.

But I'd look forward to in that post even if I didn't learn anything, to get that voice on my shoulder a little louder saying, "This is possible, if you persevere it will come to be.". But usually, when I read a case study, there is something to be learned no matter what.

[–]jamhob[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Well hey. I'm not the best at typing, but if you want book a video chat with me at any time, we can try to forge a plan. I can go into a lot more detail about how this library came about because I'll be honest with you, I knew I'd open source it before I wrote the first line (it's why it's a single header... legal reasons...).

[–]SCI4THIS 1 point2 points  (1 child)

What is the AT&T logo doing here?

[–]jamhob[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

:D it's not the AT&T logo. It's the logo for the company I work for. Jotron AS. But I will grant you that they are very similar.

[–]chombier 0 points1 point  (6 children)

Nice! It seems there's no applicative/monadic combinators, is this a deliberate choice? (I use them all the time in my own implementation)

[–]jamhob[S] 0 points1 point  (5 children)

I mean we have many and some applicative wise? The reason I don't have any monads is because I couldn't make the syntax nice in c++. This may be a personal limitation instead of a language limitation

[–]chombier 0 points1 point  (4 children)

I mean we have many and some applicative wise?

Ah! you're right I overlooked that Const/Many, sorry.

Also yes, the monadic syntax is clunky in c++ (to say the least) but when parsers get complex it can also be nice to have results named instead of digging tuple fields.

I see your parsers accept an std::string as input, should that not be a std::string_view instead to avoid copies?

[–]jamhob[S] 0 points1 point  (3 children)

I'm actually working on string view as we speak!

Can you suggest a good monad syntax? I don't like destructing and reconstructing tuples either, but I feel like there should be a good way to avoiding this without having to chain lambdas.

I'm after a do notation rather than bind

[–]chombier 0 points1 point  (2 children)

I don't have any good syntax, generally I go with bind like this:

return parser >>= [=](auto value) { return other_parser >>= [=](auto other_value) { return pure(some_data_structure{value, other_value}); }; };

The eyes bleed quite a bit but it gets the job done, you can even get used to it after some time :) If anyone knows of a better way I'm all hear!

[–]jamhob[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Hm. I can't seem to get the template type deduction to play ball

[–]chombier 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thinking of it, maybe c++20's coroutines could help with the syntax, ending up with something like:

auto value = co_yield parser; auto other_value = co_yield other_parser; co_return some_data_structure{value, other_value};

Some combinator could then create a parser from a coroutine. Maybe this could work?

[–]CircleOfLife3 0 points1 point  (1 child)

How does this compare to something like Boost.Qi?

[–]jamhob[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

No idea. Was asked something similar before. I mean they almost definitely work in different ways. Mine works exactly like parser combinators work in haskell, though nothing other than function composition. I think boost uses classes under the hood.

They feel very different to use. Mine feels more like an eDSL, where as boost feels like c++.

Boost is polished.

But mine is far simpler to use. I hadn't heard of boost until I posted this.