Comment by jonstewart
1 year ago
The article is pretty clear about this. When it comes to fast lexing and parsing, it is typical for projects to make portability tradeoffs in favor of performance. For example, simdjson is full of assembly.
1 year ago
The article is pretty clear about this. When it comes to fast lexing and parsing, it is typical for projects to make portability tradeoffs in favor of performance. For example, simdjson is full of assembly.
Portability isn't just about use of non-standard features. It is in general about the reliance on such features. In simdjson there is a fallback implementation without any assembly, making the project as a whole portable. You could do the same in a protobuf parser, but I honestly doubt that someone would implement a tail recursion optimization relying parser for a language like protobuf and then have a separate FSA implementation inside the same library as a fallback. Unless maybe both parsers are not hand-written, but generated with a parser generator maybe. Instead you would probably just say "fuck it, this parser library is not portable, period".