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Antlr-Ng Parser Generator

Antlr-Ng Parser Generator

7 comments

·September 9, 2025
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Eridrus

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

Philpax

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.

vbezhenar

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.

another_twist

Quite right. But antlr is better for query parsing. They also have error listeners so error handling can be added.

another_twist

Why -ng ? I thought it had something to do with angular.

almostgotcaught

It just means next gen

macote

I used ANTLR to create a grammar file for MK (Manufacturing Knowledge). I plugged the JavaScript parser and lexer into Ace editor. Good memories.