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.
