benjamin-hodgson/Pidgin

Health v2 · maintenance only

Adoption not part of the score

1100 stars · 74 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-30, confidence not recorded

Pidgin is a lightweight, fast parser combinator library for C# and .NET. It lets developers declaratively build parsers for text or binary formats within general-purpose code, without external parser generator tools.

Use cases

• parse a custom DSL or configuration language in C#
• build a parser for a programming or query language
• parse structured text where regex is not powerful enough
• parse binary file formats with typed token streams
• write declarative grammar specifications as executable C# code
• replace ANTLR with a simpler in-code parsing solution

When to choose

• you need to parse context-free languages in .NET without external tooling
• you want parsers that read like grammar specifications in C#
• you need better error reporting and composability than regex provides
• you want a lightweight, fast alternative to parser generators like ANTLR

When to avoid

• you only need simple regex-based matching
• you are not working on the .NET platform
• you need maximum parsing performance from a hand-written recursive descent parser
• your grammar is best expressed with a separate grammar file and code generation step

Facets

library · maturity active

parser parsers programming-languages developer-tools dotnet cross-platform parser-combinators csharp text-parsing dsl

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