Making it a goal now ensures that we *can* take our time "doing it right," *before* it becomes an immediate need. A comprehensive test suite is a must for this, and I know a lot of work has been put into improving the one we have over the past few weeks. And, of course, there's still room for optimization in the current codebase.
Agreed, but our test suite isn't nearly as good as it should be, we only have a few tests for each feature most of which test only basic functionality of that feature as opposed to testing it in some situations which are used "in the wild" and/or expected.
The parser tests are currently alot better than nothing, and if something passes them it's certainly close to being a drop-in replacement for the current parser, but they aren't quite perfect at the moment.