Dear GCC Team, Last weekend I finished the release of my directly coded analyzer generator engine for Quex. First, I thought, it would be just a nice idea to step away from table driven approach of flex/lex. Directly coding also facilitates the step towards analysis of different character encodings (iconv as a pre-filter).
I was really amazed about the performance of this approach and also about the fact that probably not many people have tried to go that way. First benchmarks have shown a boost of 200-250% in speed gain over a flex generated engine! Still, there are some topics of synchronisation with OS-buffering which I have not addressed yet. So I think there can be even more of a speed gain. Is there any interest in using such an engine in the GCC toolset? It would be an honor for me to provide any adaptions you require. Anyway, quex's syntax is mostly conform to flex/lex, so there is not much 'getting used to' with this generator. I am also positive, that it is very hard to program a hand-written analyzer that is faster, since the engine does not do any house-keeping and profits from Hopcroft- Optimization and Binary-Search for code generation. These things are hard to to by hand. There is a sourceforge project at http://quex.sf.net where the generator can be downloaded. The documentation is still 'first draft' but shows what the thing it can do. The core engine comes with a large set of unit tests, so I am feel comfortable about its stability. Best Regards Frank Schäfer -- // Dr.-Ing. Frank-René Schäfer, Bodelschwinghstr. 28 // D-50170 Kerpen // Tel.: 49+176/22 02 58 59; -- // Dr.-Ing. Frank-René Schäfer, Bodelschwinghstr. 28 // D-50170 Kerpen // Tel.: 49+176/22 02 58 59;
