[ANN] New release of Menhir (20250903)

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It is my pleasure to announce a new release of Menhir. The main change is improved parser construction time in --table mode.

  • The table back-end uses a new table compression algorithm.

    This algorithm is significantly faster than the previous algorithm: in our tests, it can be up to 8 times faster. This results in observably faster compilation: for example, the time required to compile the OCaml parser drops from 1.2 seconds to 0.6 seconds.

    Compared with the previous algorithm, the new algorithm produces results of roughly similar quality: the size of the compressed tables can increase or decrease by a few percent, up to 20% in the most dramatic cases. On average, we observe a 1% increase in size.

    The use of the previous algorithm can be requested by the command line switch --pack-classic. This command line switch may disappear in the future.

    (Contributed by Frédéric Bour; reviewed by François Pottier.)

To install this release, please type:

opam update && opam install menhir.20250903

Happy parsing,
François.

15 Likes
2

Thanks.

Is there a reason why the release process (commit 6d38bfb2224a3414b0f07f6a5493b831d4c4d4ea) removes the CHANGES.md file? Commit 0adb78e6e139aabfb3721bed7b64d5ae599dbe34 probably went too far IMHO.