research-article

Sweeten your JavaScript: hygienic macros for ES5

Authors:

Nathan Faubion,

Cormac FlanaganAuthors Info & Claims

DLS '14: Proceedings of the 10th ACM Symposium on Dynamic languages

Pages 35 - 44

https://doi.org/10.1145/2661088.2661097

Published: 14 October 2014 Publication History

Abstract

Lisp and Scheme have demonstrated the power of macros to enable programmers to evolve and craft languages. In languages with more complex syntax, macros have had less success. In part, this has been due to the difficulty in building expressive hygienic macro systems for such languages. JavaScript in particular presents unique challenges for macro systems due to ambiguities in the lexing stage that force the JavaScript lexer and parser to be intertwined.

In this paper we present a novel solution to the lexing ambiguity of JavaScript that enables us to cleanly separate the JavaScript lexer and parser by recording enough history during lexing to resolve ambiguities. We give an algorithm for this solution along with a proof that it does in fact correctly resolve ambiguities in the language. Though the algorithm and proof we present is specific to JavaScript, the general technique can be applied to other languages with ambiguous grammars. With lexer and parser separated, we then implement an expressive hygienic macro system for JavaScript called sweet.js.

References

[1]

The Esprima JavaScript Parser. http://esprima.org/.

[2]

The Rust Language. http://www.rust-lang.org/.

[3]

A. Alexandrescu. Modern C

[4]

design: generic programming and design patterns applied. 2001.

Digital Library

[5]

E. Allen, R. Culpepper, and J. Nielsen. Growing a syntax. Proceedings of Workshop on Foundations of Object-Oriented Languages, 2009.

[6]

J. Bachrach, K. Playford, and C. Street. D-Expressions: Lisp Power, Dylan Style. Style DeKalb IL, 1999.

[7]

M. Bravenboer and E. Visser. Concrete syntax for objects: domain-specific language embedding and assimilation without restrictions. OOPSLA '04 Proceedings of the 19th annual ACM SIGPLAN conference on Object-oriented programming, systems, languages, and applications, 2004.

Digital Library

[8]

W. Clinger. Macros that work. In Proceedings of the 18th ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT symposium on Principles of programming languages - POPL '91, pages 155--162, New York, New York, USA, Jan. 1991. ACM Press.

Digital Library

[9]

R. Cox, T. Bergan, and A. Clements. Xoc, an extension-oriented compiler for systems programming. ACM SIGARCH Computer Architecture News, 2008.

Digital Library

[10]

R. Culpepper and M. Felleisen. Fortifying macros. In Proceedings of the 15th ACM SIGPLAN international conference on Functional programming - ICFP '10, volume 45, page 235, New York, New York, USA, Sept. 2010. ACM Press.

Digital Library

[11]

T. Disney, N. Faubion, D. Herman, and C. Flanagan. The Sweet.js Appendix. https://github.com/mozilla/sweet.js/blob/master/doc/dls2014/sweetjs-appendix.pdf .

[12]

S. Erdweg, T. Rendel, C. K\"astner, and K. Ostermann. SugarJ: library-based syntactic language extensibility. OOPSLA '11 Proceedings of the 2011 ACM international conference on Object oriented programming systems languages and applications, 2011.

Digital Library

[13]

N. Faubion. The Sparkler project. https://github.com/natefaubion/sparkler.

[14]

M. Flatt. Composable and compilable macros: You Want it When? ICFP '02 Proceedings of the seventh ACM SIGPLAN international conference on Functional programming, 37(9):72--83, Sept. 2002.

Digital Library

[15]

M. Flatt and R. Culpepper. Macros that Work Together. Journal of Functional Programming, 2012.

[16]

J. Foderaro, K. Sklower, and K. Layer. The FRANZ Lisp Manual. 1983.

[17]

S. Ganz, A. Sabry, and W. Taha. Macros as multi-stage computations: type-safe, generative, binding macros in MacroML. ICFP '01 Proceedings of the sixth ACM SIGPLAN international conference on Functional programming, 2001.

Digital Library

[18]

A. Ghuloum and R. K. Dybvig. Implicit phasing for R6RS libraries. ICFP '07 Proceedings of the 12th ACM SIGPLAN international conference on Functional programming, 42(9):303, Oct. 2007.

Digital Library

[19]

R. Grimm. Better extensibility through modular syntax. PLDI '06 Proceedings of the 2006 ACM SIGPLAN conference on Programming language design and implementation, 2006.

Digital Library

[20]

S. P. Harbison and J. Steele, G. L. C: A Reference Manual. Prentice-Hall, 1984.

Digital Library

[21]

R. Hieb, R. Dybvig, and C. Bruggeman. Syntactic abstraction in scheme. Lisp and symbolic computation, 5(4):295--326, 1992.

Digital Library

[22]

E. C. M. A. International. ECMA-262 ECMAScript Language Specification. Number June. ECMA (European Association for Standardizing Information and Communication Systems), 5.1 edition, 2011.

[23]

E. E. Kohlbecker and M. Wand. Macro-by-example: Deriving syntactic transformations from their specifications. In Proceedings of the 14th ACM SIGACT-SIGPLAN symposium on Principles of programming languages - POPL '87, pages 77--84, New York, New York, USA, Oct. 1987. ACM Press.

Digital Library

[24]

B. Lee, R. Grimm, M. Hirzel, and K. McKinley. Marco: safe, expressive macros for any language. ECOOP 2012-Object-Oriented łdots, 2012.

Digital Library

[25]

J. Long. The es6-macros project. https://github.com/jlongster/es6-macros.

[26]

M. Martel and T. Sheard. Introduction to multi-stage programming using metaml. 1997.

[27]

N. Nystrom, M. Clarkson, and A. Myers. Polyglot: An extensible compiler framework for Java. Compiler Construction, 2003.

Digital Library

[28]

PerlMonks. On Parsing Perl. http://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=44722.

[29]

K. M. Pitman. Special forms in Lisp. In Proceedings of the 1980 ACM conference on LISP and functional programming - LFP '80, pages 179--187, New York, New York, USA, Aug. 1980. ACM Press.

Digital Library

[30]

J. Rafkind. Syntactic extension for languages with implicitly delimited and infix syntax. PhD thesis, 2013.

Digital Library

[31]

J. Rafkind and M. Flatt. Honu: Syntactic Extension for Algebraic Notation through Enforestation. Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Generative Programming and Component Engineering, 2012.

Digital Library

[32]

J. Riehl. Language embedding and optimization in mython. DLS '09 Proceedings of the 5th symposium on Dynamic languages, 2009.

Digital Library

[33]

T. Sheard and S. Jones. Template meta-programming for Haskell. Proceedings of the 2002 ACM SIGPLAN workshop on Haskell, 2002.

Digital Library

[34]

K. Skalski, M. Moskal, and P. Olszta. Meta-programming in Nemerle. Proceedings Generative Programming and Component Engineering, 2004.

[35]

W. Taha and T. Sheard. Multi-stage programming with explicit annotations. PEPM '97 Proceedings of the 1997 ACM SIGPLAN symposium on Partial evaluation and semantics-based program manipulation, 1997.

Digital Library

[36]

S. Tobin-Hochstadt and V. St-Amour. Languages as libraries. PLDI '11 Proceedings of the 32nd ACM SIGPLAN conference on Programming language design and implementation, 2011.

Digital Library

[37]

E. Visser. Program transformation with Stratego/XT. Domain-Specific Program Generation, 2004.

[38]

A. Warth and I. Piumarta. OMeta: an object-oriented language for pattern matching. Proceedings of the 2007 symposium on Dynamic languages, 2007.

Digital Library

Cited By

Ballantyne MGamburg MHemann J(2024)Compiled, Extensible, Multi-language DSLs (Functional Pearl)Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages10.1145/36746278:ICFP(64-87)Online publication date: 15-Aug-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3674627
Flatt MAllred TAngle NDe Gabrielle SFindler RFirth JGopinathan KGreenman BKasivajhula SKnauth AMcCarthy JPhillips SPorncharoenwase SSøgaard JTobin-Hochstadt S(2023)Rhombus: A New Spin on Macros without All the ParenthesesProceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages10.1145/36228187:OOPSLA2(574-603)Online publication date: 16-Oct-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3622818
Clinger WWand M(2020)Hygienic macro technologyProceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages10.1145/33863304:HOPL(1-110)Online publication date: 12-Jun-2020
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3386330
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

Sweeten your JavaScript: hygienic macros for ES5
1. Software and its engineering
  1. Software notations and tools
    1. Compilers
      1. Parsers

Recommendations

Honu: syntactic extension for algebraic notation through enforestation
GPCE '12: Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Generative Programming and Component Engineering

Honu is a new language that fuses traditional algebraic notation (e.g., infix binary operators) with Scheme-style language extensibility. A key element of Honu's design is an enforestation parsing step, which converts a flat stream of tokens into an S-...
Sweeten your JavaScript: hygienic macros for ES5
DLS '14

Lisp and Scheme have demonstrated the power of macros to enable programmers to evolve and craft languages. In languages with more complex syntax, macros have had less success. In part, this has been due to the difficulty in building expressive hygienic ...
Macros for domain-specific languages

Macros provide a powerful means of extending languages. They have proven useful in both general-purpose and domain-specific programming contexts. This paper presents an architecture for implementing macro-extensible DSLs on top of macro-extensible host ...

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

DLS '14: Proceedings of the 10th ACM Symposium on Dynamic languages

October 2014

160 pages

ISBN:9781450332118

DOI:10.1145/2661088

General Chair:
Andrew Black
Portland State University, USA
,
Program Chair:
Laurence Tratt
King's College London, UK

ACM SIGPLAN Notices Volume 50, Issue 2
DLS '14
February 2015
146 pages
ISSN:0362-1340
EISSN:1558-1160
DOI:10.1145/2775052
Editor:
Andy Gill
University of Kansas, Lawrence, KS
Issue’s Table of Contents

Copyright © 2014 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

Sponsors

SIGPLAN: ACM Special Interest Group on Programming Languages

In-Cooperation

SIGAda: ACM Special Interest Group on Ada Programming Language

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 14 October 2014

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Request Permissions

Check for updates

Author Tags

Qualifiers

Research-article

Conference

SPLASH '14

Sponsor:

SIGPLAN

SPLASH '14: Conference on Systems, Programming, and Applications: Software for Humanity

October 20 - 24, 2014

Oregon, Portland, USA

Acceptance Rates

DLS '14 Paper Acceptance Rate 13 of 28 submissions, 46%;

Overall Acceptance Rate 32 of 77 submissions, 42%

Upcoming Conference

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

13
Total Citations
View Citations
287
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)12
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)2

Reflects downloads up to 16 Oct 2024

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

Ballantyne MGamburg MHemann J(2024)Compiled, Extensible, Multi-language DSLs (Functional Pearl)Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages10.1145/36746278:ICFP(64-87)Online publication date: 15-Aug-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3674627
Flatt MAllred TAngle NDe Gabrielle SFindler RFirth JGopinathan KGreenman BKasivajhula SKnauth AMcCarthy JPhillips SPorncharoenwase SSøgaard JTobin-Hochstadt S(2023)Rhombus: A New Spin on Macros without All the ParenthesesProceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages10.1145/36228187:OOPSLA2(574-603)Online publication date: 16-Oct-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3622818
Clinger WWand M(2020)Hygienic macro technologyProceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages10.1145/33863304:HOPL(1-110)Online publication date: 12-Jun-2020
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3386330
Lilis YSavidis A(2019)A Survey of Metaprogramming LanguagesACM Computing Surveys10.1145/335458452:6(1-39)Online publication date: 16-Oct-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3354584
Karim RTip FSochurkova ASen K(2019)Platform-Independent Dynamic Taint Analysis for JavaScriptIEEE Transactions on Software Engineering10.1109/TSE.2018.2878020(1-1)Online publication date: 2019
https://doi.org/10.1109/TSE.2018.2878020
Schuster CDisney TFlanagan C(2016)MacroficationProceedings of the 25th European Symposium on Programming Languages and Systems - Volume 963210.5555/3089528.3089553(644-671)Online publication date: 2-Apr-2016
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/3089528.3089553
Flatt M(2016)Binding as sets of scopesACM SIGPLAN Notices10.1145/2914770.283762051:1(705-717)Online publication date: 11-Jan-2016
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2914770.2837620
Schuster CFlanagan CFuentes LBatory DCzarnecki K(2016)Reactive programming with reactive variablesCompanion Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Modularity10.1145/2892664.2892666(29-33)Online publication date: 14-Mar-2016
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2892664.2892666
Flatt MBodik RMajumdar R(2016)Binding as sets of scopesProceedings of the 43rd Annual ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages10.1145/2837614.2837620(705-717)Online publication date: 11-Jan-2016
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2837614.2837620
Schuster CDisney TFlanagan C(2016)Macrofication: Refactoring by Reverse Macro ExpansionProgramming Languages and Systems10.1007/978-3-662-49498-1_25(644-671)Online publication date: 2016
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-49498-1_25
Show More Cited By

View Options

Get Access

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Full Access

Get this Publication

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

eReader

View online with eReader.

Media

Figures

Other

Tables

View Table of Contents