langkit/doc/introduction.rst

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Introduction
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Langkit is a tool whose purpose is to ease the development of libraries to
analyze program source files.  It makes it super-easy to create combined
lexers, parsers and semantic analyzers as libraries that have C, Ada and
Python bindings.


Architecture
============

Langkit is a kind of compiler:

* Its users are expected to write a language specification. This is a Python
  package that uses the ``langkit`` package to define a lexer, a parser and the
  structure of the AST that the parser will instantiate.

* Langkit compiles this specification into an analysis library in Ada with C
  and Python bindings.

* The generated library can be shipped to programmers that intend to write
  analysis tools such as code editors, code checkers, etc. These will not be
  aware of Langkit at all.

.. image:: architecture.svg
   :align: center