Comment by Apanatshka

It really depends on the kind of parsing that you're doing.

Full context-free grammar are supported by "generalised parsing". The older stuff is GLR by Tomita, Early parsing, the CYK algorithm. The newer stuff based on Tomita is the particular rabbit hole I stuck with for a while. I read about SGLR which eliminates lexers, GLL which is GLR but based on the LL algorithm. The people who do GLL research also did improvements on SGLR with improved speed on right-nulled grammars. Then there is the SGLR improvements with disambiguation filters, automatic derivation of error recovery with island grammars, etc. The disambiguation filters include a kind of negation, making the current implementation of SGLR for SDF capable to parsing Boolean Grammars, which are a superset of context-free grammars.

Anyway, there's more than context-free grammars. Definitely look into data-dependant grammars! It's able to define a lot of interesting things, like network protocol formats where you parse the length of the payload, then based on that length you know how much to interpret as the payload before you read the footer of the message. And you write all of that in a more declarative way and get a nice parser generated from it.

There is so much more, but I think I should to stop now :)