[pjc50]

One of the smartest projects I've ever seen was a tool that took the human-readable tables of the HEVC and AV1 specs, used them as input to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OMeta parser-generator, and then output both HEVC parsers in a variety of languages and also auto-fuzzers for test coverage. Ended up at https://www.graphcore.ai/posts/graphcore-open-sources-argon-...

Personally I've also written a parser-generator for XML in C# to overcome some of the odd limitations of Microsoft's one when used in AOT contexts.

Hand-rolling is easy if the grammar is small. The larger it gets (and video codecs are huge!) the more you want something with automatic consistency.

[kerkeslager]

Sure, if you need parsers in a dozen languages, then a parser generator might to make sense because you're not writing one parser, you're writing a dozen.

But, the vast majority of parsers I've written didn't have this requirement. I needed to write one parser in one language.