This option enables/disables the results cache in generated parsers.
Until now, it was always enabled, but after this commit it needs to be
enabled explicitly (i.e. the |cache| option default value is |false|).
The reason is that parsing without it is *much* faster according to the
benchmark.
Note that disabling the cache breaks the linear parsing time guarantee,
meaning that with some grammars you can get exponential parsing time
with respect to the input length. This, together with the possibility of
improving the cache performance in the future, is the reason to keep it
as an option.
Speed impact
------------
Before: 214.08 kB/s
After: 827.52 kB/s
Difference: 286.54%
Size impact
-----------
Before: 1045396 b
After: 949783 b
Difference: -9.15%
(Measured by /tools/impact with Node.js v0.6.6 on x86_64 GNU/Linux.)
This option makes the generated parser track line and column during
parsing. Tracked line and column are made available inside actions and
predicates as |line| and |column| variables.
Note that in actions these variables denote start position of the
action's expression while in predicates they denote the current
position. The slightly different behavior is motivated by expected
usage.
The change does not change the benchmark suite execution speed
statistically significantly.
Detailed results (benchmark suite totals as reported by "jake benchmark"
on Node.js 0.4.8):
-----------------------------------
Test # Before After
-----------------------------------
1 128.20 kB/s 128.03 kB/s
2 130.36 kB/s 128.73 kB/s
3 126.53 kB/s 129.72 kB/s
4 127.46 kB/s 127.48 kB/s
5 127.63 kB/s 128.53 kB/s
-----------------------------------
Average 128.04 kB/s 125.50 kB/s
-----------------------------------
Closes GH-25.
Calling the parsing function could have been done without the ugly table
using |eval|, but this seemed to degrade performance significantly (by
about 3 %). This is probably because engines optimize badly in presence
of |eval|.
The method used in this patch does not change the benchmark suite
execution speed statistically significantly on V8.
Detailed results (benchmark suite totals):
---------------------------------
Test # Before After
---------------------------------
1 38.24 kB/s 38.28 kB/s
2 38.35 kB/s 38.15 kB/s
3 38.43 kB/s 38.40 kB/s
4 38.53 kB/s 38.20 kB/s
5 38.25 kB/s 38.39 kB/s
---------------------------------
Average 38.36 kB/s 38.39 kB/s
---------------------------------
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US) AppleWebKit/534.16 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/10.0.648.151 Safari/534.1
1. |PEG.Compiler| -> |PEG.compiler|
2. |PEG.grammarParser| -> |PEG.parser|
This brings us closer to the desired structure of the PEG object, which
is:
+-PEG
|- parser
+- compiler
|- checks
|- passes
+- emitter
These are the only things (together with the |PEG.buildParser| function
and exceptions) that I want to be publicly accessible -- as extension
points and also for easy testing of PEG.js's components.
Before this change, the start rule was the one named "start" and there
was an option to override that. This is now impossible.
The goal of this change is to contain all information for the parser
generation in the grammar itself.
In the future, some override directive for the start rule (like Bison's
"%start") may be added to the grammar.
Little change in the source grammar now does not change variables in all
the generated code. This is helpful especially when one has the
generated grammar stored in a VCS (this is true e.g. for our
metagrammar).
Labeled expressions lead to more maintainable code and also will allow
certain optimizations (we can ignore results of expressions not passed
to the actions).
This does not speed up the benchmark suite execution statistically
significantly on V8.
Detailed results (benchmark suite totals):
---------------------------------
Test # Before After
---------------------------------
1 28.43 kB/s 28.46 kB/s
2 28.38 kB/s 28.56 kB/s
3 28.22 kB/s 28.58 kB/s
4 28.76 kB/s 28.55 kB/s
5 28.57 kB/s 28.48 kB/s
---------------------------------
Average 28.47 kB/s 28.53 kB/s
---------------------------------
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US) AppleWebKit/533.4 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/5.0.375.55 Safari/533.4
I'll introduce labelled expressions shortly and I want to use ":" as a
label-expression separator. This change avoids conflict between the two
meanings of ":". (What would e.g. "foo: 'bar'" mean? Rule "foo"
matching string "bar", or string "bar" labelled "foo"?)
David Majda