Use ANTLR 4.0

[lschuetze]

Hello, ANTLR 4.0 has been released January 22, 2013.
Maybe newer versions of EMFText will use this new version of ANTLR?

[mirkoseifert]

The antlr-4.0.tar.gz is already on my desktop :)

We will certainly integrate the new ANTLR release, but you should not expect big differences. There might be some performance improvements, but since we've already patched the previous ANTLR release to run faster, I'd not expect much better speed. Nonetheless, we'll see what happens.

I'll label this issue as 'enhancement'.

[lschuetze]

I was more interested in the features @parrt promised in his "Why do we need ANTLR v4?" : "Honey Badger takes any grammar that you give it; it just doesn't give a damn."

[mirkoseifert]

Well, I don't think we can benefit from the honey badger mode very much. Since indirect left recursion is still a problem, most grammars will still need a rewrite (or use the beloved @operator feature of EMFText). I do however like the external visitors. I thought of separating the tree construction from the parser code for quite some time and now ANTLR seems to provide this out of the box. But, we'll probably see decreased performance and we must check whether it is a problem or not.

If you like to experiment with ANTLR 4 feel free to patch EMFText. I can give you some hints where to start if needed.

[timeraider4u]

Has there been any progress yet? It seems that ANTLR3 is not longer maintained while ANTLR4 receives active contributions...

[mirkoseifert]

There is a student working on this, but as far as I know his thesis is not finished yet and I did not receive a pull request.

[timeraider4u]

Okay, thank you for this update. Looking forward to read any news...