Building Faster Parsers Through Data-Oriented Design: Flat Arrays Over Pointer Trees
By
Arshad Yaseen
Summary
This article presents a data-oriented design approach to building high-performance parsers, using the author's experience creating Yuku — a JavaScript/TypeScript parser written in Zig that outperforms established parsers. The core thesis is that parser performance depends less on grammar handling and more on how the resulting tree is represented in memory. The author advocates designing data structures first (using flat arrays of indices rather than pointer-based trees), which simultaneously solves memory layout, allocation, and serialization challenges. The piece provides detailed technical guidance on applying this methodology to any parser or compiler frontend in a native language.
Source
Twitter / XBuilding Faster Parsers Through Data-Oriented Design: Flat Arrays Over Pointer Treesarshad.fyiKey quotes
· 3 pulledDesign the data structure first, let the machine's access patterns dictate it.
A parser is usually taught as a problem of grammars, but once the grammar is correct, almost all of the performance and most of the engineering difficulty live somewhere else, in how the resulting tree is represented in memory.
Flat arrays of indices instead of a pointer tree makes a parser fast and collapses memory layout, allocation, and serialization into one decision.
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