[antlr-interest] Undesirable ANTLRWorks behavior

William B. Clodius wclodius at los-alamos.net
Wed Jan 6 21:04:07 PST 2010


ANTLRWorks 3.2 on a Mac OS X 10.6.2, regular download from the ANTLR site so I don't believe it is Eclipse hoasted, is showing different odd behaviors on a large grammar file and a .stg file I am editing, that I suspect are related.

First, the syntax checking runs after every keystroke. As most changes in words or strings etc. result in an invalid token the console gets flooded with errors. This would be greatly reduced if the checking were performed only after any carriage return, or better yet, when the code is generated.

Second, it will sometimes give messages that it is running short of memory that can be temporarily fixed by closing other applications, particularly applications that run Java code.

Third it will sometimes slow down to a crawl with no messages. I suspect, but don't know how to prove, that this is a symptom of stressed garbage collection due to short memory.

It would not surprise me that both of the last two are indirect symptoms of the first problem. In particular I suspect it is keeping track of edits to an unnecessary level of detail.


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