Lexical Scanning in Go - Rob Pike

What this video covers

Rob Pike shows how the Go text/template lexer is built, using state functions, goroutines and channels. The talk was given at a Google Technology User Group in Sydney in 2011.

Why it surfaced in Hacker News

HN returns to it for years as an elegant introduction to writing a lexer that is easy to follow even without a parsing background.

Recommendation context

Short excerpts from positive mentions. Open the source to read the full Hacker News discussion.

“Rob Pike has an excellent video about this”

“It's far more interesting than it sounds, and even if you don't know much about lexing/parsing it's easy to follow.”

“I love everything about this talk.”