skip parser option? about gherkin2

[aslakhellesoy]

This would definitely speed things up, but wasn't the Ragel lexer able to do this at some point? I don't remember the exact reason for writing a hand-written parser (we've talked about it before and I have forgotten). Wasn't it to open up for slightly different grammars like JBehave? Since I don't care so much about JBehave anymore I don't think we need more than one grammar.

Would it be possible to ditch the transition table based parser altogether and have Ragel do all the validation work?

[msassak]

We were doing that in Ragel, but abandoned it for increased testability and flexibility. Introducing that seam for testing made a big difference in ease of development. I think all the talk of speeding things up is a waste of time right now because a) Gherkin doesn't even work with Cucumber yet, despite it being 40x faster than Treetop, and b) we haven't measured anything. The only truly slow part of Gherkin seems to be the C extension on 1.9, which for some reason is much slower than the C extension on 1.8.x, though still faster than Treetop.

[msassak]

Also, I forgot that we are using the flexibility for the steps parser.

[aslakhellesoy]

Thanks for the recap Mike. Let's revisit this after Cucumber integration.

[aslakhellesoy]

Closing this, since it doesn't seem to have significant impact on performance.