Oh no! My parser sprouted into an entire compiler! Compilers should not be reserved for programming languages! With the right care (lots of sun, proper hydration) compilers are wildly beneficial outside of their traditional context. In fact we wrote one for GraphQL, a query language! In this talk, I'd like to tell you about the journey of apollo-rs - how we started with a performant, lossless, recursive-descent parser with really good errors that has now become a query-based, diagnostics-first, easily usable modern compiler.