Suggestions for Improvements

Here are some projects that would-be gawk hackers might like to take on. They vary in size from a few days to a few weeks of programming, depending on which one you choose and how fast a programmer you are. Please send any improvements you write to the maintainers at the GNU project. See section Adding New Features, for guidelines to follow when adding new features to gawk. See section Reporting Problems and Bugs, for information on contacting the maintainers.

1. Compilation of awk programs: gawk uses a Bison (YACC-like) parser to convert the script given it into a syntax tree; the syntax tree is then executed by a simple recursive evaluator. This method incurs a lot of overhead, since the recursive evaluator performs many procedure calls to do even the simplest things. It should be possible for gawk to convert the script's parse tree into a C program which the user would then compile, using the normal C compiler and a special gawk library to provide all the needed functions (regexps, fields, associative arrays, type coercion, and so on). An easier possibility might be for an intermediate phase of awk to convert the parse tree into a linear byte code form like the one used in GNU Emacs Lisp. The recursive evaluator would then be replaced by a straight line byte code interpreter that would be intermediate in speed between running a compiled program and doing what gawk does now.
2. The programs in the test suite could use documenting in this book.
3. See the `FUTURES' file for more ideas. Contact us if you would seriously like to tackle any of the items listed there.

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