Some ideas

2025-03-30

I typically learn best when motivated to work on something practical, and am currently a bit adrift with respect to where and how to devote my learning energy in a productive way.

So this post should serve as a place for me to capture some ideas and that I can return to when feeling stuck.

Tooling for RELAX NG Compact

At $work I've been developing a schema using RELAX NG Compact syntax for an XML data format my team works with. Below are a couple of ideas for related projects.

rnc2rng-rs

rnc2rng is a Python tool for converting RELAX NG Compact to RELAX NG's XML representation. It might be fun to port this to Rust. As an aside, it appears the maintainer is a skilled Rust developer.

A good first step, valuable on its own, might be to port the lexer to Rust using Logos

Study tree-sitter-rnc

I thought I had an original idea (does such a thing exist?): to create a Tree-sitter parser for RELAX NG Compact. A web quick search quickly informed me that a brilliant person has already done so. So, my new idea: learn from this work, and perhaps figure out how to incorporate it into Neovim.

Useful resources

XML and Rust

I saw this blog post on https://lobste.rs/ this past week. It seems like a great way to learn more about XML, Rust, and programming language implementation. I hope this project succeeds.

A good place to start reading the code is the lexer, which uses Logos (mentioned above). I'll need to have the XPath spec open next to it.

Miscellaneous

My mind and interests are always flitting around. Capturing some stray ideas here:

Work through Tumble Forth
Study up to get past Sequence Counter in TIS-100