Quick Start

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#### Quick Start

###### Why would you want to use Spirit.Qi?

Spirit.Qi is designed to be a practical parsing tool. The ability to generate a fully-working parser from a formal EBNF specification inlined in C++ significantly reduces development time. Programmers typically approach parsing using ad hoc hacks with primitive tools such as scanf. Even regular-expression libraries (such as boost regex) or scanners (such as Boost tokenizer) do not scale well when we need to write more elaborate parsers. Attempting to write even a moderately-complex parser using these tools leads to code that is hard to understand and maintain.

One prime objective is to make the tool easy to use. When one thinks of a parser generator, the usual reaction is "it must be big and complex with a steep learning curve." Not so. Spirit is designed to be fully scalable. The library is structured in layers. This permits learning on an as-needed basis, after only learning the minimal core and basic concepts.

For development simplicity and ease in deployment, the entire library consists of only header files, with no libraries to link against or build. Just put the Spirit distribution in your include path, compile and run. Code size? -very tight -essentially comparable to hand written recursive descent code.

Our tutorials will walk you through the simplest Spirit examples, incrementally building on top of the earlier examples as we expose more and more features and techniques. We will try to be as gentle as possible with the learning curve. We will present the tutorials in a cookbook style approach. This style of presentation is based on our BoostCon '07 and BoostCon '08 slides.

Have fun!