A few questions on the project

[tajmone]

Hi @tvandijck, thanks for this great project — as far as I know, this is the only port of the GOLD Builder to other languages currently available.

I wanted to ask a few questions:

• What's the license of this project? (can't see a LICENSE file)
• What's the current status of the project? Is it stable?
• What's the difference between the Frustel and GoldEngine subprojects?
• What does "Frustel" mean? (I looked up in Sweedish dictionaries and couldn't find the word)

Unfortunately I have no experience in C#, but this project could still be a precious reference for attempting to implement the Builder in other lanugages.

Thanks for you time.

[tvandijck]

• Oef... Uhm, well as far as a license, I'm pretty much in the "do whatever the f you want license".
  Certainly for this....

• Frustel is just a stupid dutch word, it doesn't really translate to anything really...

• As for the status, I liked gold and have used it for many years.. but it seems to be a mostly abandoned project, so I attempted to decompile the Visual Basic and make it work in C#. But I have honestly no idea how far I got.. I don't think I ever got it to work properly and mostly just moved on to using ANTLR instead. I'm not a big fan of it, but at least it's maintained and works well.

[tvandijck]

Oh, and as for the difference, the GoldEngine folder is the original gold engine decompiled.. the frustel folder is then an attempt at making it actually work.

[tajmone]

Thank you so much for all the clarifications!

I'm also a fan of DWTFYW and Unlicense, so I appreciate it. Now that the license part is clear, I'll proceed to fork the repository.

Whatever the current project status, it's a an invaluable reference for whoever wants to start porting GOLD to a new language, especially since you've kept the GoldEngine decompiled sources in the project. The rest can be inferred from the documentation and by testing against various grammars and comparing their compiled output.

I liked gold and have used it for many years.. but it seems to be a mostly abandoned project

Yesterday I dropped an email to Devin Cook asking about the project status, let's see if I get a reply (unfortunately, the Yahoo group no longer stores past conversations, so I couldn't dig there).

Keep up the good work!

[avonwyss]

@tajmone Nice to see others being interested in some GOLD stuff...

I'm the author of the C# bsn GoldParser engine, and I also noticed that Devin Cook seems to have abandoned the project. Please let us know if you get a reply.

That being said, I have since played around with my own parser stuff, which includes DFA generation and LALR parsing. It does a bit more than what GOLD can do, for instance the DFA can also handle non-char regular expressions, and as a proof of concept I implemented byte-level DFA for UTF-8 unicode grammars which allows to skip the UTF-8 to unicode decoding step. Also it does generate LINQ-Expressions which can be compiled to IL code for better performance. I have not yet, however, made a Builder like the one from GOLD. This may also serve as partial basis for a GOLD successor project, feel free to get in touch with me.

Regarding the Yahoo! Group, I do have a complete dump of the group somewhere which I obtained when the groups where shut down. If you need something specific, I can look if I can find it there.

[tajmone]

Hi @avonwyss !

I'm the author of the C# bsn GoldParser engine

I'm aware of this excellent work of yours, and the benefits of the BSN (read about it also on CodeProject). Indeed, it introduces a great deal of benefits, especially when working on a new lang step by step.

Regarding the Yahoo! Group, I do have a complete dump of the group somewhere which I obtained when the groups where shut down. If you need something specific, I can look if I can find it there.

Are you aware if there were any fairly recent update from Devin regarding the project?

I didn't find any activity on the GOLD website nor the Facebook group after 2012. I'm aware that he had set some conditions for the release of the sources, part of which included some enhancements he had in mind, but I think that mostly he was looking for some standards-organizations to give some recognition to the GOLD parser system (which is rather understandable).

It would be nice to see the whole project source published on GitHub (or similar) and be able to contribute to making GOLD cross platform (even if with a clause restriction of not altering its current behavior), and I'd also be happy to port all the documentation to a more VCS-friendly format, like AsciiDoc, so that it might be reused — but of course, I'll need permission from Devin, or him granting a License to the docs and code, in order to do so.

Eight years without activity is quite a long time, and I just started to worry that GOLD might eventually disappear if the website went down. The GOLD legacy is still strong, and it would be unfortunate if this happened.

[avonwyss]

Hi @tajmone , thank you for your message.

There was nothing newer from Devin in the Yahoo Groups other than the message you could find on the GOLD Google Groups from October 2013:

I want to apologize for the lack of updates and correspondence on my part.

The project is still supported - so, please, no worries. I just haven't had the time to work on it for quite a while. I'm teaching 4 classes and 4 labs this semester - very fun, but very time consuming.

I'm going to get to everyone's e-mail this weekend.

Have a great weekend!

• Devin