Or you could take the middle ground and use a library meant to make it easier to create hand built parsers. as opposed to a library that generates a parser for

Or you could take the middle ground and use a library meant to make it easier to create hand built parsers. as opposed to a library that generates a parser for you. * Repo: https://github.com/SAP/chevrotain https://github.com/SAP/chevrotain * Online Playground: http://sap.github.io/chevrotain/playground/ http://sap.github.io/chevrotain/playground/ This handles the repetitive parts such as lookahead functions creation or Parse Tree building, while also providing advanced features such as error recovery or syntactic content assist (auto complete). * ECMAScript family of languages supported (JavaScript/TypeScript/CoffeeScript).