[antlr-interest] antlr & antlr studio...

[Jim Idle]

> Out of interest , how stable is V3?  Does it do everything it says on
> the tin yet? :)
 
I find that you need the occasional work around but that because of the nature of it, if you have produced somethign that works once, it will always work. The lack of documenation at the moment is probably the most difficult thing to surmount but you can piece it all together from teh examples if you are willing.

> However when it hits VS2005, I'll almost certainly use your C codegen
> since at least theres a modicum of interop between that and C#..hmm I
> wonder if turning on the managed C++ for it would be an option in that
> case?

I shall look into this as well as generating a COM interface for the generated code too as plenty of people still need to use this. It might make more sense to use the C++ output for such things but in theory it should all be the same under the hood. Further of course, there is a C# output in in progress (not sure how far along it is), which obviously make the most sense if you are accessing the generated code from C# unless there were some performance penalty. However the generated code is logically efficent so it is only the choices made with the runtime implementation that would have dramatic effects on performance - it seems like everyone involved in code generation knows what they are doing though.
 
If it is a possiblity I woudl use ANTLR3 now as other than the start up time, while there are potentially bugs in there, they do not matter if you configure your grammar to avoid them and the code you generate works for the task at hand. Future modifications to ANTLR3 don't have to be adoopted until you are ready. Of course, the general patina of Early Access may put many people off but ANTLR3 is close to being 'there' if you ask me.
 
Jim