Can parser combinators be made efficient?

Question

Around 6 years ago, I benchmarked my own parser combinators in OCaml and found that they were ~5× slower than the parser generators on offer at the time. I recently rev

Answer 1

Have you tried one of the known fast parser libraries? Parsec's aims have never really been speed, but ease of use and clarity. Comparing to something like attoparsec may be a more fair comparison, especially because the string types are likely to be more equal (ByteString instead of String).

I also wonder which compile flags were used. This being another trolling post by the infamous Jon Harrop, it would not surprise me if no optimisations were used at all for the Haskell code.