> To make a long story short: very old versions of http_parser were based on a Ragel grammar but the handwritten version outperformed it by a significant margin

> To make a long story short: very old versions of http_parser were based on a Ragel grammar but the handwritten version outperformed it by a significant margin, as in over 10% fewer branches taken. > Ragel is great but it can't take shortcuts like a human programmer can and once you start jumping around in your grammar, things become complicated fast (and impossible to debug.) https://github.com/joyent/http-parser/pull/156#issuecomment-22933119 https://github.com/joyent/http-parser/pull/156#issuecomment-...