Let's stop parser Hell

[Chad J]

On 07/07/2012 01:01 PM, Roman D. Boiko wrote:
> On Saturday, 7 July 2012 at 16:56:06 UTC, Chad J wrote:
>> Yeah, it's good to hear this notion reinforced. I had this suspicion
>> that the packrat parser is not necessarily the best/fastest solution,
>> mostly because of the large allocation that has to happen before you
>> get O(n) performance. Thus I figured that pegged might eventually use
>> different parsing strategies underneath it all, possibly with a lot of
>> special-casing and clever hand-tuned and profiled optimizations. At
>> least that's what makes sense to me.
>
> At the very least, we could use DFA instead of backtracking where
> possible. This is the approach implemented in ANTLR, but I wanted to
> introduce them before I knew about existence of the latter, simply
> because this would likely produce the fastest parsers possible.

These were my thoughts exactly, although somewhat unsubstantiated in my 
case ;)