November status update

written on Wednesday, December 4, 2024

Introduction

I planned to continue working on Pixel Wheels last month, but I needed a break. And I was looking for an excuse to continue learning Rust. At work I spend a lot of time on some quite hairy Python regular expressions, that sounded like a perfect opportunity: let's write a regular expression syntax highlighter and linter!

Yes, looks like I started yet another project.

Cranking my geek-dad joke level to 11, I called this tool... Regex Night :)

What does this tool do?

Regex Night can do 3 things.

First, it can print a syntax-highlighted version of a regular expression:

Second, it can print this regular expression as a tree:

Third, it can report problems in a regular expression:

Version 0.1.0 can only report unnecessary groups. The upcoming 0.2.0 can also report unnecessarily escaped characters.

You can find Regex Night on its GitLab page.

I am experimenting with GitLab these days, evaluating what I would miss if I were to move projects away from GitHub. So far the biggest limitation I have encountered is the lack of Windows and macOS runners in the CI. It looks like cross can build Windows binaries, but that is not legally possible for macOS (not surprised by that). Other than that it feels pretty good.

What's next?

After this "break", I am going to resume work on Pixel Wheels. Probably 😁.