Entries by Alessio Stalla

Migrating from ANTLR2 to ANTLR4

July 1, 2020 in , , /by

ANTLR is a popular parser generator or “compiler-compiler”, developed by prof. Terence Parr and several contributors. It’s been around since 1992, as an evolution of PCCTS. It’s gone through multiple major versions. The latest incarnation of ANTLR is version branch 4.x, the first release of which is from 2013. Here at Strumenta, we use ANTLR4 […]

Quick Domain-Specific Languages in Python with textX

April 8, 2020 in /by

Introduction textX is a suite of Python modules and tools to quickly develop text-based domain-specific languages. Compared to heavyweight language workbenches such as Jetbrains MPS, Eclipse Xtext or Spoofax, textX is less powerful and not as feature-rich; however, it’s directly usable in Python with minimal effort as it’s just another Python library, and it has […]

JaRIKo, an RPG Interpreter in Kotlin

March 11, 2020 in /by

Introduction In this article, we’ll review JaRIKo, an open-source interpreter for a subset of the RPG programming language running on the Java Virtual Machine. People interested in legacy modernization techniques should find this interesting: as we’ll see in the course of the article, the driving force behind JaRIKo is the ultimate migration of a product with thousands […]