enso/docs/parser/reader.md

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---
layout: developer-doc
title: Reading Source Code
category: parser
tags: [parser, reader]
order: 10
---
# Reading Source Code
The reader is responsible for abstracting the interface to reading a character
from a stream. This handles abstracting away the various encodings that the
project is going to use, as well as backing formats for the stream.
<!-- MarkdownTOC levels="2,3" autolink="true" -->
- [Reader Functionality](#reader-functionality)
- [Reader Structure](#reader-structure)
- [Read](#read)
- [Decoder](#decoder)
- [Provided Encodings](#provided-encodings)
- [UTF-8](#utf-8)
- [UTF-16](#utf-16)
- [UTF-32](#utf-32)
- [Benchmarks](#benchmarks)
<!-- /MarkdownTOC -->
## Reader Functionality
The reader has the following functionality:
- It reads its input _lazily_, not requiring the entire input to be in memory.
- It provides the interface to `next_character`, returning rust-native UTF-32,
and abstracts away the various underlying encodings.
- It allows to bookmark the character that was last read, and return to it later
by calling `rewind`.
## Reader Structure
The lazy reader consists of the following parts:
### Read
The `Read` trait is similar to `std::io::Read`, but supports different encodings
than just `&[u8]`. It provides the interface
`fn read(&mut self, buffer:&mut [Self::Item]) -> usize` that fills the provided
buffer with the data that is being read.
Any structure that implements `std::io::Read` also implements `Read<Item=u8>`.
### Decoder
The `Decoder` trait is an interface for reading a single character from an
underlying buffer `fn decode(words:&[Self::Word]) -> Char`. The type of buffer
depends on the type of the underlying encoding so that i.e. UTF-32 can use
`&[char]` directly.
#### Example Usage
To put things into perspective, this is how the reader is constructed from a
file and a string.
```rust
let string = "Hello, World!";
let byte_reader = Reader::new(string.as_bytes(), DecoderUTF8(), 0);
let file_reader = Reader::new(File::open("foo.txt")?, DecoderUTF8(), 0);
```
## Provided Encodings
The decoders currently provides the following input encodings.
### UTF-8
Rust natively uses UTF-8 encoding for its strings. In order for the IDE to make
use of the parser, a simple rust-native UTF-8 encoding is provided.
### UTF-16
As the JVM as a platform makes use of UTF-16 for encoding its strings, we need
to have a reader that lets JVM clients of the parser provide the source code in
a streaming fashion without needing to re-encode it prior to passing it to the
parser.
### UTF-32
Rust also uses UTF-32 encoding for its characters. Therefore, this encoding is
required in order to support inputs as `&[char]`.
### Benchmarks
7/17/2020: The reader throughput is around 1e+8 chars/s (or 1e-8 secs/char).