alecthomas/participle

Health v2 · maintenance only

Adoption not part of the score

3878 stars · 212 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-29, confidence not recorded

Participle is a parser and lexer library for Go that lets you define grammars declaratively using annotated Go struct tags, similar in style to encoding/json. It supports EBNF-style grammar syntax, custom lexers, union types, and detailed error reporting.

Use cases

• parse a custom config file format in Go
• build a DSL parser in Go
• write a lexer and parser for a small language
• parse structured text into Go structs
• generate an AST from source text in Go
• implement an ini or expression parser

When to choose

• you want idiomatic Go parsers defined via struct tags without code generation
• you need a lightweight parser library with good error reporting
• you are parsing a small-to-medium DSL or structured text format

When to avoid

• you need extremely high-performance parsing of huge inputs
• you need a full production-grade compiler frontend with advanced grammar features
• your grammar requires features outside Participle's limitations, such as complex context-sensitive parsing

Facets

library · maturity stable

parser developer-tools parsers developer-tools programming-languages go cross-platform lexer grammar ebnf ast struct-tags parser-combinator

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