[Mono-list] mcs compiles on linux. Now what?

[Miguel de Icaza]

> > In general custom lexers are slower than machine generated ones. I did some
> > work a long time ago on porting a fast lexer generator to C# -- I could dig it
> > up if there's need for it.
> 
> This is miguel's call.

The lcc book claims that a lex/flex-based lexer is slower than a custom
built one.

But if someone wants to write a new lexer that has the same interface we
can do some measurements.  

Now, at some point I thought `the debugging support in jay and the lexer
are slow', I added some timestamps and found out that parsing/lexing
only took 1/20th of the total compile time with the MS CLR (you can run
mcs with --timestamp option).

So I am not sure that this is the best place to optimize.  One good
candidate to optimize is to reduce the number of name lookups we perform
(I know we are performing completely invalid name lookups in some cases)
Miguel