Trait Speculative

pub trait Speculative {
    // Required method
    fn advance_to(&self, fork: &Self);
}

Available on crate feature parsing only.

Extensions to the ParseStream API to support speculative parsing.

Required Methods

fn advance_to(&self, fork: &Self)

Advance this parse stream to the position of a forked parse stream.

This is the opposite operation to ParseStream::fork. You can fork a parse stream, perform some speculative parsing, then join the original stream to the fork to “commit” the parsing from the fork to the main stream.

If you can avoid doing this, you should, as it limits the ability to generate useful errors. That said, it is often the only way to parse syntax of the form A* B* for arbitrary syntax A and B. The problem is that when the fork fails to parse an A, it’s impossible to tell whether that was because of a syntax error and the user meant to provide an A, or that the As are finished and it’s time to start parsing Bs. Use with care.

Also note that if A is a subset of B, A* B* can be parsed by parsing B* and removing the leading members of A from the repetition, bypassing the need to involve the downsides associated with speculative parsing.

Example

There has been chatter about the possibility of making the colons in the turbofish syntax like path::to::<T> no longer required by accepting path::to<T> in expression position. Specifically, according to RFC 2544, PathSegment parsing should always try to consume a following < token as the start of generic arguments, and reset to the < if that fails (e.g. the token is acting as a less-than operator).

This is the exact kind of parsing behavior which requires the “fork, try, commit” behavior that ParseStream::fork discourages. With advance_to, we can avoid having to parse the speculatively parsed content a second time.

This change in behavior can be implemented in syn by replacing just the Parse implementation for PathSegment:

use syn::parse::discouraged::Speculative;

pub struct PathSegment {
    pub ident: Ident,
    pub arguments: PathArguments,
}

impl Parse for PathSegment {
    fn parse(input: ParseStream) -> Result<Self> {
        if input.peek(Token![super])
            || input.peek(Token![self])
            || input.peek(Token![Self])
            || input.peek(Token![crate])
        {
            let ident = input.call(Ident::parse_any)?;
            return Ok(PathSegment::from(ident));
        }

        let ident = input.parse()?;
        if input.peek(Token![::]) && input.peek3(Token![<]) {
            return Ok(PathSegment {
                ident,
                arguments: PathArguments::AngleBracketed(input.parse()?),
            });
        }
        if input.peek(Token![<]) && !input.peek(Token![<=]) {
            let fork = input.fork();
            if let Ok(arguments) = fork.parse() {
                input.advance_to(&fork);
                return Ok(PathSegment {
                    ident,
                    arguments: PathArguments::AngleBracketed(arguments),
                });
            }
        }
        Ok(PathSegment::from(ident))
    }
}

Drawbacks

The main drawback of this style of speculative parsing is in error presentation. Even if the lookahead is the “correct” parse, the error that is shown is that of the “fallback” parse. To use the same example as the turbofish above, take the following unfinished “turbofish”:

let _ = f<&'a fn(), for<'a> serde::>();

If this is parsed as generic arguments, we can provide the error message

error: expected identifier
 --> src.rs:L:C
  |
L | let _ = f<&'a fn(), for<'a> serde::>();
  |                                    ^

but if parsed using the above speculative parsing, it falls back to assuming that the < is a less-than when it fails to parse the generic arguments, and tries to interpret the &'a as the start of a labelled loop, resulting in the much less helpful error

error: expected `:`
 --> src.rs:L:C
  |
L | let _ = f<&'a fn(), for<'a> serde::>();
  |               ^^

This can be mitigated with various heuristics (two examples: show both forks’ parse errors, or show the one that consumed more tokens), but when you can control the grammar, sticking to something that can be parsed LL(3) and without the LL(*) speculative parsing this makes possible, displaying reasonable errors becomes much more simple.

Performance

This method performs a cheap fixed amount of work that does not depend on how far apart the two streams are positioned.

Panics

The forked stream in the argument of advance_to must have been obtained by forking self. Attempting to advance to any other stream will cause a panic.

Dyn Compatibility

This trait is not dyn compatible.

In older versions of Rust, dyn compatibility was called "object safety", so this trait is not object safe.

Implementors

impl<'a> Speculative for ParseBuffer<'a>