[antlr-interest] Antlr v4 - C++ target

[Sam Harwell]

Hi Richard,

I wouldn't expect a C++ version of ANTLR 4 within the next 12 months. The
Java target and ANTLRWorks 2 are both still pre-alpha. I'm not planning to
start the C# target until a release candidate of v4 is available, and the C#
target will involve ports of the runtime, the tool, and potentially
integration of some ANTLRWorks 2 features into Visual Studio. After that is
working I'll start the C++ port.

I'm confident that under standard usage the C++ port will reduce memory to
about 10-15% of what 3.4 currently requires. Using templates and a custom
token type, it should be possible to cut that down to <5% of what 3.4
requires.

--
Sam Harwell
Owner, Lead Developer
http://tunnelvisionlabs.com


-----Original Message-----
From: Richard Gildea [mailto:rgildea at gmail.com] 
Sent: Tuesday, January 10, 2012 5:19 PM
To: antlr-interest at antlr.org
Subject: [antlr-interest] Antlr v4 - C++ target

Hi,

These are mainly questions for Terrence/Sam Harwell (who I believe will be
writing the C++ target):

1) Is there even a vague estimate of when a likely C++ target is likely to
be available for v4 (even an alpha/beta version)? Is it likely to be on the
scale of e.g. 2-3 month, 4-6 months, 6 months-1 year, 1 year+?

2) Is the C++ target expected to have a much lower memory footprint than the
current v3.4 C target?

After recently realising that the v3.4 C target has a largish memory
footprint (see my recent emails to the list), there has been some pressure
among some of my co-developers to move to a handwritten parser over ANTLR
(especially from those who were suspicious of using ANTLR from the start) in
order to reduce the memory usage. Our parser is required to read files as
large as 0.5 Gb, hence the pressure to keep memory usage as low as possible.

It sounds like v4 will likely be a big improvement over v3.4, and I think
knowing the answers to the above questions could influence whether or not we
move away from ANTLR with our parser.

Cheers,

Richard

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