# 🛠️ Zig Parser Developer Guide
Zig support for the Oak language framework.
This guide is designed to help you quickly get started with developing and integrating `oak-zig`.
## 🚦 Quick Start
Add the dependency to your `Cargo.toml`:
```toml
[dependencies]
oak-zig = { path = "..." }
```
### Basic Parsing Example
The following is a standard workflow for parsing a Zig source file:
```rust
use oak_zig::{ZigParser, SourceText, ZigLanguage};
fn main() {
// 1. Prepare Zig source code
let code = r#"
const std = @import("std");
pub fn main() !void {
const stdout = std.io.getStdOut().writer();
try stdout.print("Hello, {s}!\n", .{"Oak"});
}
"#;
let source = SourceText::new(code);
// 2. Initialize parser
let config = ZigLanguage::new();
let parser = ZigParser::new(&config);
// 3. Execute parsing
let result = parser.parse(&source);
// 4. Handle results
if result.is_success() {
println!("Parsing successful! AST node count: {}", result.node_count());
} else {
eprintln!("Errors found during parsing.");
for diag in result.diagnostics() {
println!("[{}:{}] {}", diag.line, diag.column, diag.message);
}
}
}
```
## 🔍 Core API Usage
### 1. Syntax Tree Traversal
After a successful parse, you can use the built-in visitor pattern or manually traverse the Green/Red Tree to extract Zig constructs like function definitions, comptime blocks, or struct declarations.
### 2. Incremental Parsing
Zig projects often involve many small files or frequent edits. `oak-zig` supports sub-millisecond incremental updates:
```rust
// Re-parse only the modified section
let new_result = parser.reparse(&new_source, &old_result);
```
### 3. Error Recovery
The parser is designed for industrial-grade fault tolerance, recovering gracefully from missing semicolons or malformed `try/catch` blocks to provide continuous feedback in IDEs.
## 🏗️ Architecture Overview
- **Lexer**: Tokenizes Zig source text, supporting Zig-specific features like multi-line strings, character literals, and preprocessor-like `@import`.
- **Parser**: A high-performance recursive descent parser with Pratt parsing for expressions, handling Zig's operator precedence and complex compile-time logic.
- **AST**: A strongly-typed, lossless syntax tree that preserves all trivia (comments/whitespace) for refactoring and formatting tools.
## 🔗 Advanced Resources
- **Full Examples**: Check the [examples/](examples/) folder in the project root.
- **API Documentation**: Run `cargo doc --open` for detailed type definitions.
- **Test Cases**: See [tests/readme.md](tests/readme.md) for details on our snapshot-based testing.