• nom
  • Macro based
• combine
  • impl Trait based
• pest
  • External Grammar Files

The first choice to make when building a parser is which of the parser crates to use, if one at all. In my search for a parsing crate I found 3 options that I wanted to investigate.

The three crates were nom, pest, and combine. Three popular options that take different approaches. nom's approach is to use macros to define parsing pipelines called combinators. combine also leverages combinators but instead of using macros, it uses regular rust functions. pest is a PEG parser generator, meaning it utilizes an external grammar file to generate a parser for you.