Request for comments: std.d.lexer

[Jonathan M Davis]

On Tuesday, February 05, 2013 09:14:35 Jacob Carlborg wrote:
> Actually, when I think about it, Johnathan is working on porting the DMD
> lexer to D.

Not exactly. I decided that it would be of greater benefit to just write the 
thing according to the grammar and make sure that the compiler matched the 
spec. I've already found and fixed several bugs in the spec because of that. 
Also, given how I'm writing it, I expect that its speed will be similar to 
that of dmd given the fact that I'm writing it such that it will generally do 
the minimum number of operations required. But it wouldn't surprise me at all 
if no lexer can possibly match dmd at the moment as long as it's compiled with 
dmd (at least on Linux), because gcc's optimizer is so much better than dmd's, 
and dmd is getting compiled with gcc, whereas the competing lexer in D is 
being compiled with dmd.

I don't have a lot of time to work on my lexer at the moment, but I'd really 
like to get it done soon, and I have most of the features in place. 
Unfortunately, when I went to try and work on it again the other day, the code 
wasn't compiling anymore, and I need to figure out why. I suspect that it's a 
regression related to string mixins, but I have to investigate further to sort 
it out.

- Jonathan M Davis