Highlighting C++ with C++ is… Hard
summary
A static C++ highlighter is built with heavy template metaprogramming, a Boost.Spirit-like parser implemented in templates to emit color spans, and the project hits compiler limits: MSVC 2017 rejects declarations when symbol names inflate to ~4,500 characters (or ~218 in clang), top-level grammar name expands to ~2,000+ chars and can blow up to ~300,000 after instantiation, Itanium ABI produces shortest names, compile time for one file drops from ~1 minute to ~30s after hiding grammars in lambdas, and object size reaches 50 KB+ (65 KB MSVC, 90 KB GCC).
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