Very Fast YACC-Compatible Parsers (For Very Little Effort)

We have developed a yacc-compatible parser generator that creates parsers that are 2.5 to 6.5 times faster than those generated by yacc or bison. Our tool, mule, creates directly-executable, hard-coded parsers in ANSI C; yacc produces interpreted, table-driven parsers. Hard-coding LR parsers for speed is not a new idea. Two attributes distinguish mule from other parser generators that create hard-coded LR parsers: mule is compatible with yacc (including yacc's peculiar error recovery mechanisms), and mule does absolutely none of the complex automata analysis of previous hard-coded-parser generators. Mule creates simple, fast parsers after very little analysis.