Re: Is handwritten faster?

[John Levine]

In article <address@hidden> you write:
>Hey Adam,
>
>My two cents is to paraphrase John Levine's Flex & Bison book (ha! I almost
>said Adam Levine!):

No prob, I've been called worse.

>- yes, after tweaking, your manual parser will probably be faster.
>- but that assumes you put all the necessary time into tweaking
>- and you put in all the necessary time to get it functionally correct in
>the first place
>- but re-implementing Bison's nifty error unrolling is considered Extremely
>Nontrivial.

A more important point is that the time spent in the parser is never
significant.  If your compiler is simple, the bulk of the time is
in the lexer since it has to touch each character in the input.  If
your compiler is sophisticated, it'll spend a its time in analysis and
optimization.

R's,
John