~technomancy/antifennel

#Antifennel

Turn Lua code into Fennel code. This compiler does the opposite of what the Fennel compiler does.

There is a web-based demo where you can see it in action on Fennel's web site without installing anything.

#Usage

The only prerequisites are having Lua and GNU Make installed.

$ make && sudo make install # system-wide in /usr/local/bin
$ make install PREFIX=$HOME # user-level in ~/bin
$ antifennel targetfile.lua > targetfile.fnl

It will default to using luajit but you can run make LUA=lua5.4 to override the Lua implementation.

Pass in the --comments flag to enable limited support for comments.

#Limitations

The Antifennel compiler assumes its input file is valid Lua; it does not attempt to give good error messages when provided with files that won't parse or require newer features of Lua.

Antifennel supports all bitwise operators introduced in Lua 5.3.

Antifennel will never emit variadic operators, hashfns, or pattern matches, even in cases that would result in much better code.

Fennel code does not support goto, so neither does Antifennel.

Early returns will compile to very ugly Fennel code, but they should be correct. If you want better output, consider changing the Lua code to remove early returns before running Antifennel on it; for instance here:

local function f(x)
  if x:skip() then
    return x:done()
  end
  x:process()
  print(x, x.context)
end

... would be better as:

local function f(x)
  if x:skip() then
    return x:done()
  else
    x:process()
    print(x, x.context)
  end
end

This is not required, but it will result in much nicer-looking code.

Multiple value assignment doesn't work if setting table keys that aren't static. For instance, this is OK:

tbl.field1.q, x = "QUEUE", 13

But this is not supported:

tbl.field1[id], x = "IDENTIFIER", 99

The second example must be split into two separate assignments in order to compile, since tset does not support multiple value assignment in Fennel.

Regular line-comments are compiled to Fennel comments when the --comments argument is given; multi-line comments are currently not supported, nor are comments inside tables and argument lists. Sometimes comments which should go on the end of an existing line get placed on their own line.

Expanding multi-values into key/value tables does not work; for instance:

local t = { a = "value", "bcd", ... }

This is because while the Fennel output can contain mixed tables, it can't guarantee the order of the keys in the table, and for the above to work, the multi-valued expression must be the last one in the Lua output.

#Integration

Included with fennel-mode is an antifennel.el file which provides integration to run from inside Emacs.

#Contributing

During development, run without building:

$ luajit antifennel.lua targetfile.lua > targetfile.fnl

Send patches directly to the maintainer or the Fennel mailing list

#Copyright

Depends on fnlfmt which is included and is distributed under the same license terms.

It has been modified to support newer 5.3+ operators, comments, and to add more flexibility around name mangling.