I have a side project at work that I'm doing on evenings/weekends that I've written in perl. One part of it parses verilog source code and builds an AST. It is

I have a side project at work that I'm doing on evenings/weekends that I've written in perl. One part of it parses verilog source code and builds an AST. It is a recursive descent parser that was written in the most straight-forward way and no time has been spent optimizing it for speed. The AST builder and some auxiliary routines that make interfacing to the AST simpler to manipulate is less than 2500 lines of code and took a couple weekends to write and get working. Surprisingly, I timed the parser part and it took only 0.06 seconds to process a 2500 line file. Yes, perl is 30x slower than C, but computers are so fast that performance (for my needs) doesn't matter too much. To be fair, it is only the subset of verilog that one would typically synthesize (so no events and forks/joins, no timing annotation, etc). Doing the whole language would make the code larger but not much slower.