Re: [boost] [spirit] semantic action for mismatches?

Subject: Re: [boost] [spirit] semantic action for mismatches?
From: Joel de Guzman (joel_at_[hidden])
Date: 2011-01-10 11:35:00

On 1/11/2011 12:15 AM, caustik wrote:
> On Mon, Jan 10, 2011 at 5:02 AM, Stewart, Robert<Robert.Stewart_at_[hidden]>wrote:
>
>> Joel de Guzman wrote:
>>> On 1/10/2011 10:03 AM, caustik wrote:
>>>
>>>> I'm also curious what the difference performance
>>>> characteristics are (Spirit / Xpressive).
>>>
>>> I'm not quite keen on apples-oranges comparisons. Both xpressive and
>>> Spirit have their place. That said, I am not aware of any
>>> formal benchmarks,
>>> but there's an informal one posted by Overmind on the Boost
>>> users list:
>>>
>>>     http://lists.boost.org/Archives/boost/2009/07/153899.php
>>>
>>> With that simple test, Spirit beats highly optimized xpressive
>>> (1.5 secs vs. 9 secs). You might want to read the whole thread.
>>
>> What's disappointing is that after I did, finally, post real code, that
>> thread fizzled.
>>
>>
> It would be a nice addition to the documentation to have some thorough
> benchmark tests. Any particular ideas on what good tests would be? Maybe
> even just a note in the FAQs with a suggestion on how tests could be run,
> and asking for users to contribute, would yield some help from others. I
> would imagine that there have been a few users who ran their own internal
> tests before choosing a solution, if they were made aware of the interest in
> gathering those results, they may volunteer that data.

I don't agree.

If it were Spirit vs. other parsers (yacc, ANTLR, etc.), that would be
meaningful, yes. But if it is spirit vs. xpressive, it will be an
apple-orange comparison. There are things that are best suited for
xpressive that spirit can't do and the same the other way around.
These are different tools with some overlap. Real world uses for both
tools go beyond this common overlap. Benchmarks that test the common
denominator are at best for entertainment only. Would you write a
compiler with xpressive? I don't think so. Would you do search and
replace with Spirit? Nah.

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