Re: [boost] Using lexertl instead of spirit

From: Joel de Guzman (joel_at_[hidden])
Date: 2006-11-24 22:07:23

Dave Handley wrote:

> Personally, I would like to see something like lexertl available as a
> lexer front-end to spirit.  Ben and I have discussed putting a
> performant iterator style interface onto the front end of his code so
> that you could simply use this as the iterator type to spirit - or wave,
> or anything else for that matter.  I love the way spirit works, but have
> always been limited in using it in the real world for most things
> because of performance reasons - I know Joel and team are working on
> spirit 2 which should address many of these performance issues, but it
> is my firm belief that a fast lexer tagged to the front of spirit or
> spirit2 would make a huge difference to the performance of generated
> parsers.
> 
> Also, the fact that it is very fast to build the DFA in Ben's code is
> interesting.  This allows more potential for building dynamic parsers
> which could be very useful in a whole range of potential apps.

I agree. Hartmut and I do intend to supply a standard lexer
with Spirit2. Dan (Nuffer's) work on SLex was a good starting
point. It was quite fast, but not as fast as RE2C. Admittedly,
we haven't started working on optimizing it, yet. We'd definitely
be very interested in a collaboration. Please email me and
Hartmut if you are interested.

Regards,
-- 
Joel de Guzman
http://www.boost-consulting.com
http://spirit.sf.net