Parsers have traditionally been a very complex field: you have parsers, parser-generators, formal grammars, lex, yacc, bison, and a whole zoo of other tools. Even so, many fall back to hand- written recursive descent parsers in industrial situations, a choice that demonstrates the total inadequacy of all these complex tools. Why can’t you just include a library, write some code, and have a reasonably performant parser without any code-gen or other magic? What if you got syntax highlighting for free? And error- recovery? And structured, even interactive, error messages? Fastparse is a tiny, 1500LOC library that provides all the above, and more. This talk will cover the who/why/what/where/when of Fastparse and why you should consider it the next time you’re parsing plain text