I have always been a fan of flex. The thing that impressed me in this table is the speed-up from the -F and -f options -- I didn't realize it could make a 4X d

I have always been a fan of flex. The thing that impressed me in this table is the speed-up from the -F and -f options -- I didn't realize it could make a 4X difference. Anyway, in this benchmark, the author gets about a 15% speed-up going hand-coded over -f. Given that, my take-away is that flex is almost always the right answer for most lexing applications, because most of the time maintainability is going to win over getting the last 15%. If you absolutely need that last 15%, you know it, and a living a specialized life.