[Tracker] Announcement of the parser branch

[Philip Van Hoof <spam pvanhoof be>]

Hackers!

We should have done this more early, I agree. Apologizes. We want
contributors to help us implement stuff, so we should communicate with
them more often.

JÃrg recently published his changes to a branch called parser so that I
could experiment with it. This branch implements a manual SPARQL and
Trig parser.

The reason why we wanted a manual parser was because we didn't want
Rasqal to build an in-memory AST of the query. Instead, we wanted to
progressively parse it and immediately translate to a native query.

This is for performance reasons: first compiling the query to a memory
structure, iterating that structure and then dumping native SQL is
slower than while parsing the thing immediately dumping to native SQL.

Doing it immediately is also a bit harder, of course.

Anyway, I invite the more crazy people to check out the branch "parser".
Since last few days it started to work pretty well. We're now ironing
out its last issues. Like error reporting and bringing the SPARQL
functions that we added to master last few weeks.

It'll crash, it'll fail. And that's what we want you to test, report and
perhaps even patch & fix.

I think JÃrg is now done with his big refactors, so it should be
relatively safe to write a patch for it.


Coders, Start your editors!

-- 
Philip Van Hoof, freelance software developer
home: me at pvanhoof dot be 
gnome: pvanhoof at gnome dot org 
http://pvanhoof.be/blog
http://codeminded.be