> I was frankly amazed how much of the discussion was about speed.

I personally found it quite interesting to see how well a hand-crafted
parser could perform. I initially assumed the hackish RE-based
solution would be fastest.

Another aspect would of course be how long it takes to create such a
parser in comparison to the other solutions. Unfortunately, we don't
have timings for that.

> That said, Treetop is very slow, and we need to improve that.

My main concern with treetop isn't so much speed but rather that the
polygot approach. While the idea per se is pretty cool, it seems to
preclude a programmatic generation/extension of a grammar definition.
Eg store the rules as an array of lambdas, programmatically add a new
rule on demand, recreate the parser etc. If I understand it right,
this isn't easily possible with treetop. I scanned the source code a
little bit and it seems treetop requires the parser definition to be
saved on disk. I assume you're now going to tell me I'm wrong? Please
do so. I'd be glad to here it's otherwise.

Regards,
Thomas.