GHC syntax highligher
This is a syntax highlighter library for Haskell using the lexer of GHC.
Here is a blog post announcing the package, the readme is mostly derived
from it:
Motivation
Parsing Haskell is hard, because Haskell is a complex language with
countless features. The only way to get it right 100% is to use the parser
of GHC itself. Fortunately, now there is the ghc
package, which as
of version 8.4.1 exports enough of GHC’s source code to allow us use its
lexer.
Alternative approaches, even decent ones like highlight.js
either
don’t support cutting-edge features or do their work without sufficient
precision so that many tokens end up combined and the end result is
typically still hard to read.
How to use it in your blog
Depends on your markdown processor. If you’re an mmark
user, good
news, since version 0.2.1.0 of mmark-ext
it includes the
ghcSyntaxHighlighter
extension. Due to flexibility of MMark, it’s possible
to use this highlighter for Haskell and skylighting
as a
fall-back for everything else. Consult the docs for more
information.
skylighting is what Pandoc uses. And from what I can tell
it’s hardcoded to use only that library for highlighting, so some creativity
may be necessary to get it work.
Limitations
CPP directives are not lexed correctly, because the GHC parser is not
designed to parse them.
Contribution
Issues, bugs, and questions may be reported in the GitHub issue tracker for
this project.
Pull requests are also welcome.
License
Copyright © 2018–present Mark Karpov
Distributed under BSD 3 clause license.