[webkit-dev] HTML5 tokenizer landing soon

[Geoffrey Garen]

> The new parser will certainly be faster than the old, mostly because
> it's now hackable.  

Hackability is certainly an important goal, but let's not conflate it with performance. They're separate goals, and hackability doesn't magically create performance.

> The old parser was un-touchable for fear of breaking the world.  

Once again, I believe in hackability, but we don't need to rewrite history in order to justify it. In the past, we have indeed made changes to the old parser to improve its performance, to good effect.

> Yes.  We've been working with our parsing benchmark:
> 
> http://trac.webkit.org/browser/trunk/WebCore/benchmarks/parser/html-parser.html
> 
>>> What's the change?
> 
>> Last time we measured, the new parser was ~1% slower than the old
>> parser.  I believe parsing accounts for <5% of PLT, so that
>> corresponds to a <0.05% slowdown on PTL, which is, AFAIK,
>> unmeasurable.  We'll double check perf before we switch over.

Measurements like this are more valuable.

Not all HTML on the web is like the HTML in the HTML5 spec, though. Am I right that the parser test you're using doesn't test invalid HTML at all?

Thanks,
Geoff
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