Re: Parser performance, was What is the future of Compiler technology?

Gabriel Dos Reis <gdr@integrable-solutions.net> writes:


[...]


| [Ah, that makes more sense, it's the symbol table management.


That was the part I worked on. It was only one aspect of the issue;
Mark Mitchell worked on other facets, such as better data structures
for parsing declarators, better caching of class-scope symbols, etc.


| Other than rewriting the symbol table to be faster, is there any way
| to address this in the parser, e.g., batch the lookups somehow, or
| parse somehow that is less dependent on name semantics? -John]


The latest, publically documented, alternative attempt I know of is
from Scott Pike with his generalized parser (found in Elkhound).
However, I don't think it parses full ISO C++ (at least the standard
library implementation that comes with GCC). Elkhound "forks" at
ambiguity points and postpone ambiguity resolution to later phases.
That also means keeping around potentially uninteresting parse trees,
a source of potential inefficiency -- however, proper measurements
need to be done instead of speculation. It would be interesting to
know how Elkhound performs on various projects -- Qt and KDE come to
mind.


--
                                                                                                              Gabriel Dos Reis
                                                                                      gdr@integrable-solutions.net

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