  Current algorithms for context-free parsing inflict a trade-off between ease
of understanding, ease of implementation, theoretical complexity, and practical
performance. No algorithm achieves all of these properties simultaneously.
  Might et al. (2011) introduced parsing with derivatives, which handles
arbitrary context-free grammars while being both easy to understand and simple
to implement. Despite much initial enthusiasm and a multitude of independent
implementations, its worst-case complexity has never been proven to be better
than exponential. In fact, high-level arguments claiming it is fundamentally
exponential have been advanced and even accepted as part of the folklore.
Performance ended up being sluggish in practice, and this sluggishness was
taken as informal evidence of exponentiality.
  In this paper, we reexamine the performance of parsing with derivatives. We
have discovered that it is not exponential but, in fact, cubic. Moreover,
simple (though perhaps not obvious) modifications to the implementation by
Might et al. (2011) lead to an implementation that is not only easy to
understand but also highly performant in practice.
