Lexical Scanning in Go - Rob Pike

Why HN readers recommended it

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

This is a summary from the source dataset, not an endorsement by Hacker News or the video creator.

Video & recommendation details

Creator / channel

GoogleFOSSSydney

Topic

lexical scanning

Format

talk

Level

intermediate

HN recommenders in dataset

13

HN mentions in dataset

20

Recommendation years in dataset

2012–2025

These counts and years describe the included Hacker News records; they are not YouTube views or the video’s publication date.

From the original HN conversations

Excerpts from the recorded comments. Follow each source for the full comment and surrounding discussion.

• Personally, I have a penchant for writing my own pull parsers. Its a mind-expanding exercise. The neat thing about Go is that parsers can return functions that consume the next token. Rob Pike has an excellent video about this: [VIDEO]

• Rob Pike did a really good talk entitled 'Lexical Scanning In Go'[0], which covers how the lexing for text/template works. It's far more interesting than it sounds, and even if you don't know much about lexing/parsing it's easy to follow. [0] [VIDEO]

• Lexical Scanning in Go by Rob Pike [VIDEO] I love everything about this talk. It walks you through building a lexer from scratch in a simple and elegant way, through a very interesting use of coroutines. I appreciate the bits of humor in the talk …