Menhir is an LR(1) parser generator for OCaml.
Menhir has a home page.
There is a mailing list for announcements of new releases and for discussion of problems, bugs, feature requests, and so on. Only subscribers can post.
The latest released version of Menhir can be easily installed via
opam, OCaml's package manager. Just type opam install menhir.
For manual installation, see INSTALLATION.md.
Some instructions for developers can be found in HOWTO.md.
Menhir was created in 2005 by François Pottier and Yann Régis-Gianas.
In the beginning, Yann Régis-Gianas contributed the front-end (parsing .mly
files, joining multiple .mly files, expanding away %inline definitions,
expanding away parameterized nonterminal symbols, etc.) while François Pottier
contributed the middle-end (the LR(1) construction algorithms, the LR(1)
conflict explanation algorithm, etc.) and the first back-end (producing OCaml
code).
A second back-end (producing OCaml tables, and relying on the interpreter in
the menhirLib library) was implemented in 2008. An initial implementation by
Raja Boujbel and Guillaume Bau was completed and polished by François Pottier.
This project was generously funded by Jane Street Capital, LLC through the
"OCaml Summer Project" initiative.
A third back-end (producing Coq tables, and relying on a verified validator
and a verified interpreter in the coq-menhirlib library) was implemented in
2011 by Jacques-Henri Jourdan.
The incremental API, the inspection API, the notion of attribute, and the
library MenhirSdk were contributed between 2014 and 2017 by Frédéric Bour.
Merlin, an emacs mode for OCaml,
contains an impressive incremental, syntax-error-tolerant OCaml parser,
which has been a driving force for Menhir's APIs.
The switch to the dune build system was made in 2019 with the help of
Nicolás Ojeda Bär.
The reachability algorithm behind menhir --list-errors was implemented in
2015 by François Pottier. A much faster algorithm was contributed in 2021 by
Frédéric Bour.
The new code back-end, which produces efficient and well-typed OCaml code, was implemented throughout the year 2021 by Émile Trotignon and François Pottier. It relies on a new intermediate language, StackLang.
Today, the principal maintainer of Menhir is François Pottier.
The intellectual property of Menhir (including the OCaml libraries menhirLib
and menhirSdk) lies with Inria. The intellectual property of the Coq library
coq-menhirlib lies with Inria and CNRS.