[boost] Re: Formal Review: The Spirit Parser Framework.

From: Carl Daniel (cpdaniel_at_[hidden])
Date: 2002-10-13 18:22:42

More review to come, but in the meantime, a question:  have the Spirit
developers attempted to measure the performance of Spirit-generated parsers
against other parser generators (e.g. YACC, Bison, ANTLR)?  Similarly, any
have comparisons of generatd code size been done?

I ask because I was just experimenting with the samples and taking a look at
code sizes, etc.  For example, the Pascal sample, when compiled with a
compiler that's a lot like VC7 (but isn't VC7...) produces an executable
with 176K of code.  Based on the small test files that are included with the
distribution, it appears to parse the Pascal syntax "quickly" :)  IIRC, the
entire Turbo Pascal compiler was about the same size, including the code
generator, for a more complex language.  Of course, it was written in
assembly (by the father of C#), so I'd expect it to be small & fast, but the
comparison did get me wondering...

I would think that the Pascal example might be a good one to benchmark -
it's a non-trivial grammar, and I would expect that YACC and ANTLR grammars
for Pascal are readily available "out there".

-cd