Earley parser is a well-known parsing method used to analyse context-free grammars.
While being less efficient in practical contexts than other generalized context-free parsing algo-
rithms, such as GLR, it is also more general. As such it can be used as a foundation to build more
complex parsing algorithms.
We present a new, virtual machine based approach to parsing, heavily based on the original Earley
parser. We show how to translate grammars into virtual machine instruction sequences that are
then used by the parsing algorithm. Additionally, we introduce an optimization that merges shared
rule prefixes to increase parsing performance. Finally, we present and evaluate an implementation
of Scannerless Earley Virtual Machine called north.