gopikchr: a yakshave

I just completed part of a long yak-shave to add Pikchr support to my blog, generated with Hugo. I hope it helps to spread of Pikchr, and spurs implementations in other publishing pipelines.

Actually, it’s just the bottom part of an even longer yak-shave!

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                       "open my garage with a raspberry pi"
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box same as 2nd box with .nw at linewid/4 east of 3rd box.sw   "“I should document this in a blog post”"
box same as 1st box with .nw at linewid/4 east of 4th box.sw   "“I need Pikchr for diagrams”: make Pikchr work in hugo"
box same as 2nd box with .nw at linewid/4 east of 5th box.sw   "make Pikchr work in hugo"
box same as 1st box with .nw at linewid/4 east of 6th box.sw   "port Pikchr to go"
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Pikchr is a modern version of Brian Kernighan’s PIC markup language, created by the folks who make SQLite and Fossil. Like so many things from Bell Labs, it is extremely powerful, once you invest just a little time to understand how it works.

Pikchr is implemented in a single file, pikchr.y, processed using the Lemon Parser to generate lemon.c.

I decided to port both the Lemon Parser and Pikchr from C to Go, by hand.

Why?

Go and Pikchr are great! A pure-Go port of Pikchr might be useful to others.

Hugo might more readily accept pure-Go additions.

Sheer bloody-mindedness. At work we always have to make pragmatic decisions. The repressed urge to fully shave the yak comes out in my own time.

I respect the SQLite folks: their software is an amazing gift to our community. Think of this as a gift too.

How?

By hand. I looked at ccgo, the amazing C-to-Go compiler used to generate modernc sqlite, a pure-Go translation of sqlite. However, the code it generats to perform its magic is (necessarily) complicated and ugly, which seems contrary to the spirit of Pikchr. Nothing for it, but to dive in by hand. It can be almost meditative:

1. Translate lemon.c to Go, but still generate C code
2. Find all the bugs until it compiles and generates the exact same C code
3. Translate the parser template, lempar.tpl to Go, and generate Go code
4. Laboriously find all the bugs
5. Translate pikchr.y from C to Go
6. Once again, fix all the bugs until the Go version generates exactly the same Pikchr output

In all, it was almost 12,000 lines of code. I started out trying to be clever, but learned to keep things as similar as possible.

• I tried to replace char * with []rune at first, to handle unicode rather than ascii. But I ended up using []byte, and even zero-terminating the string! To move forward through the input, z += 3 becomes z = z[3:]
• I tried replacing dynamically-sized arrays represented by struct *, current_size, and n (current index) with just slices. However, it turns out to be cleaner to keep n around, because the code will often reference s[n+1] or s[n-1].

Links

• golemon, the port of lemon to Go
• gopikchr, the port of Pikchr to Go
• goldmark-pikchr, a goldmark plugin to render Pikchr diagrams in markdown
• hugo commit, the tiny change needed to enable Pikchr support in Hugo in my fork

What next?

• Find the remaining bugs. I’m certain I didn’t find them all
• Set up github actions to create issues in the golemon and gopikchr repositories whenever the C versions in Fossil change. Both change infrequently, so keeping up should be little work
• Possibly, use these techniques to port the SQLite parser to Go, if someone else doesn’t do it first. A Go SQLite-compatible parser seems more likely to get widely used, and depended on, and I’m not certain I want to be the maintainer of a popular open source package
• Enjoy using Pikchr, and seeing other people use it!

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Comments? Reach me on Twitter

I blogged a few days ago about porting Pikchr and the Lemon Parser to Go, but just now realized linking to a tweet at the end of the post is a satisfactory way to do conversations if your static blog doesn't have comments!https://t.co/aXtDNRMsyC

— Zellyn Hunter 💉² 🎉 (@zellyn) February 2, 2022