From: Steven Jenkins <steven.jenkins@...>
Date: 2005-06-10T07:08:40+09:00
Subject: Re: python/ruby benchmark.

James Edward Gray II wrote:
>> On Jun 9, 2005, at 4:15 PM, Lothar Scholz wrote:
>> - code that must do a lot of parsing
> 
> I've actually used Ruby for a pretty hefty parsing application in my  
> work.  It was my experience that this is an area where Ruby really  
> shines.  Funny to see you bring it up as the opposite of that now.

Here's a little benchmark. I wrote a parser in Racc to read the export 
format from a system engineering modeling tool. The grammar is 
non-trivial: 173 rules, 371 states. Running it on a fairly large file 
(65k lines, 3.6 MB) takes about 6 seconds on a 3.2 GHz P4 running Linux.

Note that this is a lot more than parsing. The application is 
constructing, in a correct but not very efficient way, the entire data 
model in memory. I suspect that parsing itself is a small fraction of 
the total runtime.

Steve