[antlr-interest] Antlr vs Spirit

Hrvoje Nezic hnezic at SoftHome.net
Sun Feb 20 02:36:43 PST 2005


I hope that this subject is not off topic (please excuse me if it is). 

A few days ago I had a heated discussion with my colleagues
at work about parser generators. I use Antlr while some other people use Spirit. It seems that Spirit is rather popular in the C++ community.

"Spirit is an object oriented recursive descent parser generator framework implemented using template meta-programming techniques."  " Parser objects are composed through operator overloading and the result is a backtracking LL(inf) parser that is capable of parsing rather ambiguous grammars. "

Antlr documentation or web site mentions other parser generators like JavaCC, but it doesn't mention Spirit. Does Spirit bring something new regarding computation of lookahead sets (like Antlr's approximate lookahead)?

Actually I don't understand how complex algorithms that should analyze complex grammars could be implemented with C++ templates, but that is another question.

Perhaps I should address these questions to the Spirit mailing list, but I thought it would be interesting to hear opinions from Antlr community. BTW, I don't intend to move to Spirit :)

Best regards,
Hrvoje Nezic
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