Could you please point at their error recovery functionality (I could not find it by a quick scan)? My gut feeling is that combinator-based parsing is not very well suited for this, but I may be missing something obvious.
By "error recovery," do you mean backtracking? If so, there are several ways of doing that, which can be found here:
https://hackage.haskell.org/package/parsers-0.12.2.1/docs/Te...
See the 'choice', 'option', and 'try' combinators, and also the '<|>' operator in Control.Applicative.
If you need more than that, you can extend parsers' monadic parsing to roll your own error recovery.
Currently, the best way to understand how parsers and trifecta work is to look at projects that use them. I will give you some links to the ones I've used and found helpful, if a bit more complicated than the parsers I am currently writing:
https://github.com/ekmett/ermine/tree/master/src/Ermine
https://github.com/idris-lang/Idris-dev/tree/master/src/Idri...
And here is a relevant Reddit thread, which includes a link to Edward Kmett's slide deck which motivates trifecta/parsers and gives a high-level view of how they work:
https://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/2uc6kp/are_there_a...
I hope this helps!
By recovery I mean something like "f(x,y,z;" triggering an error message "did you miss ')' here?", with parser recovering and proceeding further, in a hope to report more errors in a single run - see how Clang handles this, with a handcrafted recursive descent parser.
Backtracking does not help here, it must be done with custom heuristics at each node. I am doing this kind of things declaratively on top of an elaborate PEG-based generator (using an idea of signals attached to both successful and failed branches, and then choosing which signals to execute based on the exact points of failure), but would be very interested to see a lightweight combinator-based solution.
The author of the `trifecta` library is extremely knowledgeable about parsing/backtracking/recovery/error-reporting and has put a lot of thought into how to improve error message relevance as much as possible.
I was even more interested in handcrafted, custom error messages rather than constructed. Still cannot figure out how to stuff custom recovery heuristics into a combinator-based code.