yacv: Yet Another Compiler Visualizer

yacv is a tool for visualizing various aspects of typical LL(1) and LR parsers. Check out demo on YouTube to see sample visualizations

Introduction

Getting comfortable with parsing can be tough. While the legendary “Dragon Book” is an excellent resource for everything related to compilers, it still contains very minimal visualizations for the parsing process itself. That being said, there exist visualization tools such as LR(0) parser visualizer and LL(1) parser visualizer by Zak Kincaid and Shaowei Zhu, JSMachines, Jison etc. However, all of these tools are web-based and most of them show steps in a table which isn’t very intuitive

yacv attempts to overcome all these shortcomings by using manim

Primary features

yacv takes in a context free grammar and a string and can be used to :

1. Visualize the syntax tree
2. Visualize the LR automaton
3. Export the parsing table
4. Visualize the parsing process step-by-step using manim

Working Example

Grammar:

S -> C C 
C -> c C 
C -> d 

String: c c d d

Using the canonical LR(1) parsing method, yacv can produce the following:

Syntax Tree

LR(1) Automaton

Canonical LR(1) Parsing Table

Parsing Video