Code Generators

[TimWhiting]

Code generators are extremely useful. In particular when dealing with generating packed types to send over the web (protobuf/grpc and others), generating interfaces to libraries from other languages (C/JS), and for lexer / parser generation.

Koka code generators should be able to use other well-known projects to generate Koka code. (We shouldn't waste time rewriting from scratch when other koka libraries should have higher priority - such as the standard library). Especially when the api we are generating is minimal and doesn't look too different from what it would look like in other languages.

In particular I have added forks of 3 projects that Daan or I have used in the past and would like to update to also generate Koka code.

These are

• Alex (A Haskell project for lexer generation) - Used in Koka's Haskell compiler and recommended by Daan
• Web (A Dart project for generating bindings to web apis based on the web standards)
• Native (A Collection of Dart libraries used for generating ffi bindings to native C/Objective C/JNI/Swift interfaces)

Obviously some of these will require more changes than others, but I'm hoping that we can either make minimal changes, or be inspired by them for the approach we want to take with Koka.

I have already put in some work to port Alex, and have looked into the web package at one point in time, but the projects are there for anyone to look into and contribute if they have a use case that needs it.