regular expressions ... slow

[Kay Schluehr]

On 18 Nov., 18:47, Stefan Behnel <stefan... at behnel.de> wrote:
> Kay Schluehr wrote:
> > All of this is prototyped in Python and it is still work in progress.
> > As long as development has not reached a stable state I refuse to
> > rebuild the system in an optimized C version.
>
> And rightfully so:
>
> 1) the approach is algorithmically better, so it may even beat the current
> C implementation by design.
>
> 2) switching languages before finishing and benchmarking the prototype is a
> premature optimisation. It wouldn't be the first prototype going into
> production.
>
> 3) even before considering a reimplementation, you should throw it into
> Cython to translate it into C code, and then benchmark that.
>
> Stefan

I fully agree and in fact the Trail parser generator contains a single
extension module called cyTrail which is written in Cython - it's not
just a trivial recompilation of Python in Cython but it uses all kinds
of cdefs.

There is just a difference between optimizing existing code using the
best techniques available and writing code from scratch for speed. I
consider this as a different, subsequent project ( call it cTrail )
and I want to have more fine control than being possible with Cython -
actually I do want to understand the code in a simple language as C. I
have to idea what the code does, generated by Cython. There are entire
layers that can be stripped off when not dealing with Python types and
dynamic memory allocation.

Kay