[antlr-interest] Parser performance - newbie question.

Remus Pereni remus at nolimits.ro
Mon Apr 1 01:13:13 PST 2002


Hello praveen_c,

Monday, April 01, 2002, 11:54:10 AM, you wrote:

p> Hi, 

p> I'm new to the world of Parser Generators/Lexers. I just learned 
p> about what ANTLR and JavaCC can do and I'm pretty excited about 'em. 
p> While I don't have a complete understanding of what these tools can 
p> do, I do have the following questions.

Yes it is exactly what you need then !

p> I'm trying to write a parser that recognizes specials tags in a HTML 
p> template at runtime( in a J2EE server ). Would a parser generated 
p> from ANTLR or JavaCC offer acceptable performance when used to parse 
p> HTML templates at runtime? My gut feeling is that I can handcode a 
p> parser that offers better performance that the generated parser. I 
p> think I can optimize it better for my needs. Is that a right 
p> approach? I know when it comes to extensibility, I'll loose. But I'm 
p> willing take that risk. 

While I have no doubt that you could write your own parser it is not
worth the effort. From my experience what ANTLR generates it is
quite fast ( I had no concerns at all about the speed of
the lexer/parser/tree walker and I've done a full blown oo scripting
language).

Anyhow I believe there will be very small difference in
speed between your hand coded parser and an antlr generated one and
your time would be a lot more well spent if you go with antlr and
use the saved time to work on caching ;)

I work with anltr for almost a year now and I have the most positive
feelings about it. It is an excellent tool, thank you guys!

p> Thanks in advance for any responses.

p> -Praveen.

Best regards,
     Remus
--
Remus Pereni                  mailto:remus at nolimits.ro
http://neuro.nolimits.ro      http://mappa.mundi.net/spacemapper
http://www.nolimits.ro        http://rue.nolimits.ro



 

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