I need a fast runtime expression parser
- by Chris Lively
I need to locate a fast, lightweight expression parser.
Ideally I want to pass it a list of name/value pairs (e.g. variables) and a string containing the expression to evaluate. All I need back from it is a true/false value.
The types of expressions should be along the lines of:
varA == "xyz" and varB==123
Basically, just a simple logic engine whose expression is provided at runtime.
UPDATE
At minimum it needs to support ==, !=, , =, <, <=
Regarding speed, I expect roughly 5 expressions to be executed per request. We'll see somewhere in the vicinity of 100/requests a second. Our current pages tend to execute in under 50ms. Usually there will only be 2 or 3 variables involved in any expression. However, I'll need to load approximately 30 into the parser prior to execution.
UPDATE 2012/11/5
Update about performance. We implemented nCalc nearly 2 years ago. Since then we've expanded it's use such that we average 40+ expressions covering 300+ variables on post backs. There are now thousands of post backs occurring per second with absolutely zero performance degradation.
We've also extended it to include a handful of additional functions, again with no performance loss. In short, nCalc met all of our needs and exceeded our expectations.
