> Flex is one of the commonly used tools as a lexical analyzer. [...] Bison is a syntax analyzer.
A valid choice; one might also find re2c[1] or Ragel [2] + Lemon[3] a friendlier if less well-established implementation of essentially the same theory. Moving further away, there’s also ANTLR[4] or spending a week on a hand-coded lexer and parser.
> CPU’s parallelism is not utilized in the same way as GPU since different threads are not synchronized at all, there is simply nothing like Warp or Wavefront. [...] SIMD optimization would be a fairly bad fit for shaders since there are no four instances of shader executions at the same time.
See, however, ISPC[5,6] for how attempting to use SIMD (also known as “90% of your CPU’s compute”) does yield wavefronts, etc. (If I’m reading between the lines of the second reference correctly, the work on it paved the way for LLVM-based shader-compiler backends in AMD and Intel GPU drivers.)
[2] https://www.colm.net/open-source/ragel/