On Sunday, 4 March 2012 at 21:00:00 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
You can get away without an AST for the simplest grammars (e.g. printf etc.) but in that case you compete with hand-written code. I wouldn't think of parsing a serious grammar with more than a few productions without generating an AST. My intuition is that your work will best excel at those grammars.
This chimes nicely with the comments made at the Going Native conference with regard to clang generating an AST and MSVC and GCC not. Herb Sutter referred to it as "AST envy" (as in he wished MSVC took the AST route). I only mention it as maybe not everyone here watched that vid. Andrei himself was at the conference of course! Regards, Ben
