Re: Are compiler developers light-years ahead of other software development?

From	Ian Lance Taylor <ianlancetaylor@gmail.com>
Newsgroups	comp.compilers
Subject	Re: Are compiler developers light-years ahead of other software development?
Date	2022-01-22 15:40 -0800
Organization	Compilers Central
Message-ID	<22-01-096@comp.compilers> (permalink)
References	<22-01-059@comp.compilers> <22-01-083@comp.compilers> <22-01-090@comp.compilers>

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On Sat, Jan 22, 2022 at 3:26 PM Roger L Costello <costello@mitre.org> wrote:

>
> They ignored the rich theory and vast set of algorithms, in favor of their
> own
> proprietary code? Why would the C++ compiler developers do such a thing?
>
> /Roger
> [My guess is that they were too busy chopping down trees to sharpen their
> axes. -John]
>

The change in GCC away from using bison to a recursive descent parser was a
considered decision on the part of the GCC C++ maintainers.  I believe that
the project started at
https://gcc.gnu.org/legacy-ml/gcc/2000-10/msg00573.html and it was
committed to the tree in December, 2002.

In my experience bison/yacc parsers are really good for knowing the exact
language that you are parsing.  But it is difficult to make them generate
good error messages and it is difficult to debug them.  A language like C++
can only be parsed in conjunction with a symbol table, because the parsing
depends on the semantic meaning of tokens; that too is difficult to do
using yacc.  So while I agree that yacc parsers are theoretically superior,
I believe that experience shows that they have some problems in practice.

In fact, I would be interested in knowing whether there is any generally
used C++ compiler that uses a yacc parser.  For example, clang also uses a
recursive descent parser.

Ian

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Thread

Are compiler developers light-years ahead of other software development? Roger L Costello <costello@mitre.org> - 2022-01-16 14:36 +0000
  Re: Are compiler developers light-years ahead of other software development? Philipp Klaus Krause <pkk@spth.de> - 2022-01-16 22:13 +0100
  Re: Are compiler developers light-years ahead of other software development? gah4 <gah4@u.washington.edu> - 2022-01-17 07:14 -0800
  Re: Are compiler developers light-years ahead of other software development? anton@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at (Anton Ertl) - 2022-01-19 21:33 +0000
  Re: Are compiler developers light-years ahead of other software development? Kaz Kylheku <480-992-1380@kylheku.com> - 2022-01-22 03:01 +0000
    Re: Are compiler developers light-years ahead of other software development? anton@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at (Anton Ertl) - 2022-01-22 10:43 +0000
      Re: Are compiler developers light-years ahead of other software development? Kaz Kylheku <480-992-1380@kylheku.com> - 2022-01-22 21:38 +0000
    Re: Are compiler developers light-years ahead of other software development? Roger L Costello <costello@mitre.org> - 2022-01-22 12:50 +0000
      Re: Are compiler developers light-years ahead of other software development? Kaz Kylheku <480-992-1380@kylheku.com> - 2022-01-22 21:22 +0000
      Re: Are compiler developers light-years ahead of other software development? Ian Lance Taylor <ianlancetaylor@gmail.com> - 2022-01-22 15:40 -0800
        Re: Are compiler developers light-years ahead of other software development? Kaz Kylheku <480-992-1380@kylheku.com> - 2022-01-23 06:17 +0000

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