The grammar: The "DGrok Delphi grammar" is the Delphi grammar that I've reverse-engineered (since CodeGear doesn't publish an official Delphi grammar — or at least, not an accurate one).
The parser: The "DGrok Delphi parser" is an open-source parser that can read Delphi code and build a syntax tree from it. The parser itself is written in C#. (Why?)
The tools: The "DGrok tools" are a set of open-source tools, currently under development, for parsing Delphi source code and doing cool stuff with it: smart and lightning-fast searches, tracking down weird code constructs, refactoring, etc. See the "List of DGrok tools" below.
Current DGrok Delphi grammar (online version; may correspond to unreleased code)
DGrok downloads (grammar, parser, tools, and all source code)
DGrok comes with a demo app, which you can use to parse one or more directory trees, and then analyze the code looking for patterns.
Here's the current list of patterns it can look for. It's no FxCop, but it's a start.
class var instead of unit
globals.) This tool lists all the global variables in your code, so you
can see how bad things are and start cleaning them up.with statements make for
confusing code. Avoid them. This tool lists all the with
statements in your code.asm blocks in your code.You can also add code to look for patterns of your own. See the classes in the DGrok.Framework\Visitors directory for examples.
Currently the parser is fully capable of parsing Delphi 2007 source code, but can't read code that uses new Delphi 2009 features like string locales or generics. (The DGrok grammar doesn't document these new features either.) There's also no symbol table support yet, so the tools can't do refactorings or Find References.
More information is available in the DGrok posts on my blog.
Delphi grammar and project status
DGrok is written in C#, not Delphi. Sometimes people ask why.
When I first started the project that was to become DGrok, it was just a fancy Find tool, and I wrote it in .NET because .NET came with a regular-expression library. Later I tried using a parser generator, and there really aren't any good ones that produce Delphi code, so I stuck with C#. And when I eventually switched to a hand-coded recursive descent parser, well, I already had all these unit tests written in C#.
Besides that, C# has a lot of language niceties Delphi didn't. DGrok uses things like generics, anonymous methods, and iterators, none of which existed in Delphi back in 2004-2007 when I was writing DGrok.
I also like working in a garbage-collected environment; writing this in Delphi for Win32 would have required adding a lot of memory-management code that would just clutter things up. There was a Delphi for .NET in 2007, but they hadn't been giving it a lot of love; I don't think it even supported .NET 2.0 yet. They finally gave up on it and started reselling Oxygene instead, but that wasn't until later.
Plus, you can get a C# compiler for free. That's a bonus. I'm all in favor of free-as-in-speech tools that only have free-as-in-beer dependencies. (I suppose I could have looked into FreePascal, but I didn't have a strong desire to keep my code compilable in two different environments.)
The Ruby dependencies are mainly because it was easier and quicker to write those parts in Ruby. I'm all for using the right tool for the job, and interpreted languages are a great choice for codegen, because you can run them during your build process without needing to compile the code generator first. It's also easy and quick to hack on, which was really nice when I was bootstrapping the grammar and using Ruby to build my HTML documentation that also served as my what-to-do-next list.
Anyway, there's no technical reason you couldn't write DGrok in Delphi. If anyone wants to translate the code (or to otherwise enhance it or build on it, for that matter), I'd be happy to link to you. Or I could post the code on GitHub so you could fork it, if that would be useful. Let me know.
DGrok was written by Joe White. If you have any comments, corrections, questions, suggestions, etc., please feel free to use my contact form to get in touch with me.