I have seen a fair few parser generators over the years, but it has been a long while since I have looked at anything that has been newly developed.
What improvements have been made to make them better? The problem domain seems pretty well defined and even 20 years ago the things that were changing felt like polishing off a few rough edges caused by earlier resource constraints.
I don't want to be dismissive and say "Why make this?" as a implied suggestion that it shouldn't have been made.
Nevertheless, Why make this? I assume there are good reasons for doing this that I am not aware of, what are they?
I get the impression that someone doesn't like Java and used chat gpt to create a one-to-one typescript port.
I dislike Java as much as the next guy, but I believe the true value of tools (and this tool in particular) is in the embedded wisdom and experience of their creators/Terrence Parr. Just generating a functionally equivalent port doesn't add much value.
That said, that's just a first impression, I have no idea what motivated this fork
Basically they feel the main problem with the original antlr is it’s being stifled by its batteries included nature. They’re hoping that splitting it will make each of the runtimes more agile. They don’t mention why the core was rewritten rather than just forking the original.
What is this project's relationship with antlr? I see a different name on the copyright and the github page suggests this is not a part of the antler project, while claiming to be the next generation.
If that's the case, I think it's misleading. It's fine to fork a project, but you don't get to call yourself the next generation of someone else's project.
I mean, we shouldn't allow ownership of the common english language. Did C++ Author Bjarne Stroustrup ask permission of C authors (are there even authors to ask). Did JavaScript creator ask Java creators. There was a Go! before Golang. BASIC and Visual Basic.
I don't think this a fair interpretation of the parent comment as it's not about ownership of language. The website literally says "The next generation of ANTLR" and says "It's the successor of ANTLR4".
It's about a tool claiming to be the successor without seeming to be part of the ANTLR organisation. Are they completely different people, did the ANTLR4 owners stop writing it? There seems to be deliberately no clarification on this.
Is antlr particularly popular these days? I was under the impression that most production parsers are some kind of handwritten recursive descent parsers, primarily because they're better at providing diagnostics and can sometimes be easier to maintain.
I've used antlr to generate parser for small language used in one project. It's like 100 declarative lines of code. Writing parser by hand would be a much more complicated task.
I didn't really care about diagnostics. It has some, that's enough.
And of course it's easier to maintain declarative grammar description.
My guess is, that it's often used for those kinds of simple grammars without high requirements to impementation. When you need to get things done. Like regex. You might write code to parse a string in a more efficient way, but with regex it's almost always easier. So ANTLR is like regex engine for more complicated inputs.
Most production parsers use their own handwritten recursive descent parsers, not only because of better diagnostics (error handling, language server hinting, etc.), but also for other reasons. One such major reason is that parser generators represent a very unstable dependency. They frequently change their APIs in newer versions, and some are becoming obsolete while new ones are constantly appearing. You don't want to risk the longevity of your parser by basing it on such unstable foundations. Flex/Bison is perhaps the only exception, as it hasn't changed much over time.
Has performance of ANTLR generated code gotten better? I'm sure some of this was bad grammars, but I wasn't thrilled with what I got out of ANTLR ~15 years ago
Last time I checked, about 5 years ago, the runtime libraries for the .NET target were a performance disaster. I remember reimplementing a compatible faster one in F#, but I wasn't satisfied with the overall program so I eventually got rid of ANTLR (and .NET) for that project altogether; I don't think the code survived.
I'm a fan of antlr-ng. It's a solid upgrade if you're already using antlr. In my experience, they're fully compatible. antlr's ALL(*) parsing is relatively powerful for a parser generator, but it lacks support for incremental parsing. antlr-ng might improve things enough to be usable interactively in smaller settings, even if you need to reparse the document each time. It also comes with useful extensions like https://github.com/mike-lischke/antlr4-c3, which generates syntactic and semantic completions directly from the grammar.
I have seen a fair few parser generators over the years, but it has been a long while since I have looked at anything that has been newly developed.
What improvements have been made to make them better? The problem domain seems pretty well defined and even 20 years ago the things that were changing felt like polishing off a few rough edges caused by earlier resource constraints.
I don't want to be dismissive and say "Why make this?" as a implied suggestion that it shouldn't have been made.
Nevertheless, Why make this? I assume there are good reasons for doing this that I am not aware of, what are they?
I get the impression that someone doesn't like Java and used chat gpt to create a one-to-one typescript port.
I dislike Java as much as the next guy, but I believe the true value of tools (and this tool in particular) is in the embedded wisdom and experience of their creators/Terrence Parr. Just generating a functionally equivalent port doesn't add much value.
That said, that's just a first impression, I have no idea what motivated this fork
Their GitHub readme has a section answering this.
https://github.com/antlr-ng/antlr-ng#future
Basically they feel the main problem with the original antlr is it’s being stifled by its batteries included nature. They’re hoping that splitting it will make each of the runtimes more agile. They don’t mention why the core was rewritten rather than just forking the original.
What is this project's relationship with antlr? I see a different name on the copyright and the github page suggests this is not a part of the antler project, while claiming to be the next generation.
If that's the case, I think it's misleading. It's fine to fork a project, but you don't get to call yourself the next generation of someone else's project.
I mean, we shouldn't allow ownership of the common english language. Did C++ Author Bjarne Stroustrup ask permission of C authors (are there even authors to ask). Did JavaScript creator ask Java creators. There was a Go! before Golang. BASIC and Visual Basic.
I don't think this a fair interpretation of the parent comment as it's not about ownership of language. The website literally says "The next generation of ANTLR" and says "It's the successor of ANTLR4".
It's about a tool claiming to be the successor without seeming to be part of the ANTLR organisation. Are they completely different people, did the ANTLR4 owners stop writing it? There seems to be deliberately no clarification on this.
Is antlr particularly popular these days? I was under the impression that most production parsers are some kind of handwritten recursive descent parsers, primarily because they're better at providing diagnostics and can sometimes be easier to maintain.
I've used antlr to generate parser for small language used in one project. It's like 100 declarative lines of code. Writing parser by hand would be a much more complicated task.
I didn't really care about diagnostics. It has some, that's enough.
And of course it's easier to maintain declarative grammar description.
My guess is, that it's often used for those kinds of simple grammars without high requirements to impementation. When you need to get things done. Like regex. You might write code to parse a string in a more efficient way, but with regex it's almost always easier. So ANTLR is like regex engine for more complicated inputs.
Most production parsers use their own handwritten recursive descent parsers, not only because of better diagnostics (error handling, language server hinting, etc.), but also for other reasons. One such major reason is that parser generators represent a very unstable dependency. They frequently change their APIs in newer versions, and some are becoming obsolete while new ones are constantly appearing. You don't want to risk the longevity of your parser by basing it on such unstable foundations. Flex/Bison is perhaps the only exception, as it hasn't changed much over time.
I used ANTLR recently to prototype a spreadsheet formula language -- backend was JVM so it was reasonably easy and batteries-included.
Quite right. But antlr is better for query parsing. They also have error listeners so error handling can be added.
The Readme has a section for the raison d'être for it compared to the original ANTLR: https://github.com/antlr-ng/antlr-ng?tab=readme-ov-file#futu...
Has performance of ANTLR generated code gotten better? I'm sure some of this was bad grammars, but I wasn't thrilled with what I got out of ANTLR ~15 years ago
Last time I checked, about 5 years ago, the runtime libraries for the .NET target were a performance disaster. I remember reimplementing a compatible faster one in F#, but I wasn't satisfied with the overall program so I eventually got rid of ANTLR (and .NET) for that project altogether; I don't think the code survived.
I'm a fan of antlr-ng. It's a solid upgrade if you're already using antlr. In my experience, they're fully compatible. antlr's ALL(*) parsing is relatively powerful for a parser generator, but it lacks support for incremental parsing. antlr-ng might improve things enough to be usable interactively in smaller settings, even if you need to reparse the document each time. It also comes with useful extensions like https://github.com/mike-lischke/antlr4-c3, which generates syntactic and semantic completions directly from the grammar.
I used ANTLR to create a grammar file for MK (Manufacturing Knowledge). I plugged the JavaScript parser and lexer into Ace editor. Good memories.
Why -ng ? I thought it had something to do with angular.
It just means next gen