wak VS pest

It is hoped that posixutil's awk's bytecode-based modern design should keep performance high, theoretically higher than ancient C-based awks.

Inspired by Ray Gardner's "wak" awk implementation https://github.com/raygard/wak

A volunteer benchmarking our awk on a 1-billion line text file would be welcome.

I'll throw in a plug for https://pest.rs/ a PEG-based parser-generator library in Rust. Delightful to work with and removes so much of the boilerplate involved in a parser.

Would definitely be interesting, but from a cursory look at the repository, it doesn't look like squeezing the last percentage points of performance has been a priority yet.

Things that stand out:

- The `awk` implementation uses the Pest parser generator (https://pest.rs/), which is known to not generate the fastest possible parsers, but is great for getting up and running.

- They are using the `clap` crate for argument parsing, which is also known to not be the fastest, but again is very user friendly (for example, it does Unicode linebreaks in the output of `--help`). It's marginal, but for a tiny utility being invoked many times from a shell script, this can add up.

It's very probably "fast enough", and it makes sense to prioritize like this at this point, but people shouldn't use this expecting a performance improvement right now.

Nice work. Out of curiosity, did you consider using pest (https://pest.rs/) to help build your parser? Or is it too much for what you are doing?

And some related parser tools: - https://github.com/kevinmehall/rust-peg - https://github.com/pest-parser/pest - https://github.com/lalrpop/lalrpop

I had recently completed the first year of my Computer Science class at school and will begin my second year soon. My schools' class forces the use of Java programming language, and I absolutely hated it. So, over the course of a little less than a month, I wrote my own programming language, in Rust (objectively best programming language), using pest, to be as similar to Rust as possible, but compiling to Java.

I second pest.rs. Using it is fairly intuitive and there's also a live playground on their website which is great for quickly developing and testing your AST (abstract syntax tree) parser for whatever language you're implementing.

This is where you'll run into trouble. People who write parsing-related Rust crates generally write things like pest that expect their syntax to be defined completely at compile time so the parser can be run through the compiler's optimizers for best performance.

Give https://pest.rs a try.