According to textbooks, lexers are the bottleneck because they are the only part that has to literally look at every byte of the source (I am including hashing as part of the lexing process).
I am not sure if this is true any more. It probably depends on the language.
Even as CPUs grow faster, code bases grow bigger, so the number-of-bytes argument is still important. On the other hand, heavy optimisations and difficult languages like C++ will shift the bottlenecks to later stages.
I am not sure if this is true any more. It probably depends on the language.
Even as CPUs grow faster, code bases grow bigger, so the number-of-bytes argument is still important. On the other hand, heavy optimisations and difficult languages like C++ will shift the bottlenecks to later stages.