I am currently using in a project a custom-writen recursive-decent parser, which uses an filtering_istream so I can support compressed input. The only functionality used is peekchar, getchar and integer extraction with 'stream >> i'. I am finding that C++ streams, particularly when it comes to integer extraction, are giving terrible performance. In a small test, uncompressing to a buffer and then writing a simple custom reader on that memory buffer gives 10x performance. I would perfer not to write and support such a tool if possible. Is there a boost library which easily supports a parser with 1 character lookahead and simple things like integer extraction? Looking at the documentation, Boost::Spirit seems like a very big hammer to crack this quite small nut, and it is unclear to me how well it would fit into an existing recursive decent parser. Has anyone ever used it as such? Is there a simple alternative? Chris