Before diving into the whys and hows, it's best one got started with the what's. The best place to learn about what pest does and what its limits are is the book. Feel free to try any of the examples in the fiddle editor as well.
With that out of the way, let's go through pest's crate structure:
pest- contains bare-bones parsing functionality and error typesderive- automatically generates code that uses the above crate from a grammar filemeta- parses, validates, optimizes, and converts grammars to ASTsgenerator- generates code from an AST
vm- run ASTs on-the-fly and is used by the fiddle and debugger
It's always a good practice to start with something that drives you, but if you're not inspired at the moment, you can go for a good-first-issue. These are the kind of issues more tailored to people with less pest experience, but they are not necessarily easier; they can offer a fair challenge.
You can open a ready-to-go development workspace with Gitpod by clicking this link.
We're happy to mentor any issues as long as we have the time, but issues with a mentored tag should generally be considered when looking for ways to learn, grow, and get some honest feedback on your work.
For those of you looking for a more philosophical challenge, feel free to give these a try. A lot of the work ahead of us is hard and we need great thinkers to lay the foundation on which to build forward. Not for the faint of heart.
Our website and book are in constant need of attention. While not as well organized, they should be more approachable to the general popultion.
Sometimes it's best to just say what you want. For that, there's our Gitter room or Discord server. Leave feedback, help out, learn what people are up to, go off-topic for hours, or complain that compile times are terrible—seriously, please don't.
For more long-living threads and common questions, you can use GitHub Discussions.