A 2.5x faster Postgres parser with Claude Code
· 12 min read
Building a production-grade parser is an exercise in discipline. You need to translate thousands of grammar rules exactly. You need to catch subtle bugs that only surface on edge cases you've never seen. You need to verify every decision against a reference implementation. There are no shortcuts.
I know this because I've done it before. I led the effort to build the MySQL parser for Vitess. That took over a year with help from talented contributors. So when we needed a Postgres parser for Multigres, I expected a similar timeline.
It took eight weeks. 287,786 lines of code. 304 files. 130 commits. 71.2% test coverage. 2.5x faster than the cgo (Go's C interop) alternative.
