18209, "bmcdonald3", "Should c2chapel use the GNU parser by default?", "2021-08-11T23:19:59Z"
With the changes from this PR: Add a flag to c2chapel to use GNU parser from pycparserext by bmcdonald3 · Pull Request #18189 · chapel-lang/chapel, a flag was added to allow GNU extensions to be handled by c2chapel.
As this GNU parser (in theory/hopefully) only adds functionality, it would seem that it would make sense to have that parser be the default and possibly not even support the old parser anymore.
On the other hand, I haven't observed any cases where the correctness changes with the GNU parser, but I have observed that the GNU parser is quite a bit slower than the regular parser, although only experientially never in an actual timed setting or environment setup for performance tests. Running a make check, the GNU test cases seem to take about twice as long to pass on my laptop, but I am not sure if the performance of this is something to consider or if it really even is that much slower since I haven't collected any numbers.