I would actually say recursive descent is better for more complicated projects. Good error reporting in something like Bison is difficult, and that style of par

I would actually say recursive descent is better for more complicated projects. Good error reporting in something like Bison is difficult, and that style of parser is also not necessarily any faster. IIRC, GCC uses recursive descent for (at least partially) those reasons. However, parser combinators make things even better. You get a program that looks like a grammar, just like with a parser generator, but error reporting is much easier and because you're really writing everything in the full programming language you can be much more expressive.