[barrkel]

Even if you are writing a production compiler, you will likely not be using a tool, nor writing a tool, to generate the parser. Most production commercial compilers in practice use hand-written recursive descent with a hand-written lexer, which itself potentially uses feedback from the parser (very handy for parsing C or C++). Recursive descent usually gives context for error recovery that matches the way most programmers think about language syntax; and with it being written by hand, the recovery can be tweaked to be as smart as necessary.

Also, IDE / editor support like intellisense can greatly benefit from integration with a recursive descent parser. If you encode the cursor's position as a special token, the parser can handle that token and do a deep return (throw an exception, longjmp, whatever) with relevant context, active scopes, etc.

[carterschonwald]

this is also very very very true. And thus why parsing combinator libraries are one of the sanest defaults one can adopt in dealing with parsing