+1 I have often thought the language specification should be a project separate from the implementations, and done in a formal but plain English format similar to OMG or IETF specifications.
I suspect Sqlg's code base would have been fastly different if it had evolved from a grammer instead of an api. Cheers Pieter On Thu, 2020-12-24 at 14:41 -0500, Stephen Mallette wrote: > As a project, over the years, we've often been asked the question as > to why > Gremlin doesn't have an ANTLR style grammar. There have been varying > answers over the years to explain the reasoning but in recent years > I've > started to see where our dependence on Java for driving Gremlin > design has > not translated well as we have expanded Gremlin into other > programming > ecosystems. Using Java has often allowed idioms of that language to > leak > into Gremlin itself which introduces friction when implemented > outside of > the JVM. I think that there is some advantage to designing Gremlin > more > with just graphs/usage in mind and then determining how that design > choice > looks in each programming language. > > I think that using an ANTLR grammar to drive that design work for > Gremlin > makes a lot of sense in this context. We would effectively have > something > like a gremlin-script which would become the new language archetype. > New > steps, language changes, etc. would be discussed in its context and > then > implemented in the grammar and later in each programming language we > support in the style a developer would expect. An interesting upside > of > this approach is that we can implement gremlin-script in the > ScriptEngine > and replace GremlinGroovyScriptEngine which would help us strengthen > our > security story in Gremlin Server. Groovy processing would just be a > fallback to Gremlin scripts that could not be processed by the AST. > In fact > users who didn't need Groovy could simply not install it at all and > thus > boast a much more secure system. > > I think that inclusion of a grammar in our project is an exciting new > direction for us to take and will help in a variety of areas beyond > those > I've already related. > > If we like this direction, Amazon Neptune already maintains such a > grammar > and would be willing to contribute it to the project to live in open > source. The contribution would go through the same IP Clearance > process > gremlint is going through since it was developed outside of > TinkerPop. I'd > be happy to guide that process through if we draw to consensus here.
