# Alkale
This is the repository for Alkale, a Rust library to assist in making hand-written [LL(1)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LL_grammar) lexers.

## Goals
Alkale has three specific goals in mind for its design.

### Goal 1: Base Layer
Alkale should act as a "base layer" for a larger compiler. It implements datatypes such as `Span`s to track where tokens were in the source code. It also
implements `Notification`s, which act as a built-in lint and error system.

### Goal 2: Be efficient
Alkale does not generate lexers for you, it just provides an API to streamline the production of one. For this reason, it should
be fairly efficient and able to be tweaked.

### Goal 3: Include Many Built-Ins
Many aspects of lexers are extremely common and repetitive. Think things such as skipping whitespace, generating string or 
number tokens, recovering from errors, etc. These common elements should come pre-packaged with Alkale by default.

## Structure
The core of Alkale is built on two types: `SourceCodeScanner` and `LexerResult`. The former provides a way to interface with source code
in an organized manner, while the latter acts as an accumulator of `Notification`s (errors) and `Token`s (Actual output)

See the documentation of these types for more information.

## Performance
A well-formed Alkale lexer can operate at about 208MB/s on my fairly modest machine. (Derived from the `simplex` and `deflate` benchmark's results) This is far faster than a simple regex-based lexer, but is still beaten by some other lexers.