I think you're right: the gap between Ragel and what you want in higher-level languages is too wide to make a stack out of it IMO. I'm working on what I consid

I think you're right: the gap between Ragel and what you want in higher-level languages is too wide to make a stack out of it IMO. I'm working on what I consider a parsing stack. The key observation, in my opinion, is that you need a way of representing structured data in the high-level language that is both rich and efficient. I think Protocol Buffers can serve that role. Once you have the structured data representation, you can write parsers to read/write it. But you want the parsers to be independent of how you represent the structured data in any one language.