Pick your parsing

Acorn is a tiny, fast JavaScript parser, written completely in JavaScript, it produces a well-documented, widely used AST format excactly as Esprima does. Acorn is really fast. Just like Esprima. Acorn is tiny. About half as big as Esprima, in lines of code.

Still, there’s no good reason to pick Acorn over Esprima. So why did I pick it?

Speed

Speed sometime can be a relative thing. Imagine you are aiming to specifically parse comments. In that case, being able to invoke a function over the comment itself as the parser encounter it, will definitely increase the speed of the overal process. You wont’t need to wait for the Abstract Syntax Treet to be genereated in orded to massage the wished data. And this is what acorn offer over esprima.

The acorn onComment option can be passed in the form of a function, so that whenever a comment is encountered the function will be called with the following parameters:

• block: true if the comment is a block comment, false if it is a line comment.
• text: The content of the comment.
• start: Character offset of the start of the comment.
• end: Character offset of the end of the comment.
• If the locations options is on, the {line, column} locations of the comment’s start and end are passed as two additional parameters.

Plus, if you want to fall back to how esprima works in relation to comments, pass an array for this option instead, and each found comment is pushed to it as object in Esprima format:

{
  "type": "Line" | "Block",
  "value": "comment text",
  "start": Number,
  "end": Number,
  // If `locations` option is on:
  "loc": {
    "start": {line: Number, column: Number}
    "end": {line: Number, column: Number}
  },
  // If `ranges` option is on:
  "range": [Number, Number]
}

Final thoughts

Speed is important, but sometime the specific context you are working in can have a big impact on speed because to some very specific feature, as it is in the case of acorn, if you need to parse comments.

• Acorn
• Esprima