Lexical Scanning in Go - Rob Pike

GoogleFOSSSydney · 162K views · 2011-08-30 · 51:18

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Overview

Rob Pike shows how the Go text/template lexer is built, using state functions, goroutines and channels. The talk was given at a Google Technology User Group in Sydney in 2011.

On Hacker News

HN returns to it for years as an elegant introduction to writing a lexer that is easy to follow even without a parsing background.

Recommended by 13 HN people across 12 months · HN mentions 2012–2025

Topics

Compilers, interpreters & program analysis C, C++, Rust, Go & systems languages

What people said

hu3 · 2024-11 · Strong recommendation
Related, I love Rob Pike's talk about lexical Scanning in Go (2011). Educational and elegant approach. [VIDEO]
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grose · 2016-10 · Strong recommendation
Lexical Scanning in Go by Rob Pike [VIDEO] I love everything about this talk. It walks you through building a lexer from scratch in a simple and elegant way, through a very interesting use of coroutines. I appreciate the bits of humor in the talk as well.
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TomNomNom · 2014-05 · Strong recommendation
Rob Pike did a really good talk entitled 'Lexical Scanning In Go'[0], which covers how the lexing for text/template works. It's far more interesting than it sounds, and even if you don't know much about lexing/parsing it's easy to follow. [0] [VIDEO]
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Sources

Video by GoogleFOSSSydney, played through YouTube.

HN Library · Source license

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