Getting Started

Table of Contents

• What You Need
• Your First Parser
  • Parse existing JSON
  • Try the LR parser too
• Next Steps

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What You Need

• Zig 0.16+ — this is the only runtime requirement
• A terminal or shell

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Your First Parser

The fastest path is to start with an example grammar that already ships with the repo. Run all commands from the repository root directory.

Parse existing JSON

# 1. Generate the LL parser
zig build
./zig-out/bin/galley --parser-type ll languages/json

# 2. Build exactly that parser, then run it with release optimization
zig build -Doptimize=ReleaseFast ll-json
./zig-out/bin/ll-json languages/json/samples/code-01.json

That's it — languages/json/samples/code-01.json parses at hundreds of megabytes per second.

The separate json-recovery implementation demonstrates explicit recovery and custom messages while keeping the benchmark grammar minimal. Its demonstration input is intentionally malformed and exits with SyntaxError after reporting three recoverable value errors:

./zig-out/bin/galley --parser-type ll --with-error-recovery languages/json-recovery
zig build ll-json-recovery
./zig-out/bin/ll-json-recovery languages/json-recovery/recovery-demo.json

Try the LR parser too

# 1. Generate the LR parser
zig build
./zig-out/bin/galley --parser-type lr languages/json

# 2. Build and run it
zig build -Doptimize=ReleaseFast lr-json
./zig-out/bin/lr-json languages/json/samples/code-01.json

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Next Steps

Now that you have verified the bundled JSON parsers work, you can learn how to use Galley from another Zig project, explore the other included languages, check out the CLI configuration and flags, or start writing your own custom language.