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