Ragel success story

[Wincent Colaiuta]

On 5 feb, 01:56, Adrian Thurston <thurs... at cs.queensu.ca> wrote:
>
> It seems from the Rakefile that you're using the default output code
> style. If speed is what you're after you should try the -G2 option :D

Excellent suggestion. Tokenizing times without -G2:

                                user     system      total        real
short slab of ASCII text    0.780000   0.000000   0.780000
(  0.777619)
short slab of UTF-8 text    1.200000   0.000000   1.200000
(  1.202833)
longer slab of ASCII text  12.710000   0.000000  12.710000
( 12.747387)
longer slab of UTF-8 text  18.650000   0.020000  18.670000
( 19.015087)

So those numbers are about 10 times faster than ANTLR.

And now with -G2:

                                user     system      total        real
short slab of ASCII text    0.180000   0.000000   0.180000
(  0.182539)
short slab of UTF-8 text    0.320000   0.000000   0.320000
(  0.330065)
longer slab of ASCII text   2.740000   0.000000   2.740000
(  2.792006)
longer slab of UTF-8 text   5.000000   0.000000   5.000000
(  5.072432)

Here are the ANTLR numbers again for comparison:

                                user     system      total        real
short slab of ASCII text    9.400000   1.870000  11.270000
( 11.308913)
short slab of UTF-8 text    8.620000   1.880000  10.500000
( 10.551956)
longer slab of ASCII text 132.380000  19.690000 152.070000
(153.296844)
longer slab of UTF-8 text 116.280000  19.510000 135.790000
(136.788652)

So with -G2 Ragel is nearly 38 times faster than ANTLR's fastest
target! I'm really struggling to believe how good the results are.
I'll update my article shortly with the new figures.

Thanks very much for building such an awesome project.

Cheers,
Wincent