The Great New ANTLR 4.8

It has  been more than two years since the last major release of ANTLR, now version 4.8 is ready. ANTLR is a mature and well-tested project, but this release still manages to bring a new target, a fix for the C# packet, improvement on the compilation of the C++ runtime and a few fixes.

New Target

The big news of this release is the new target for ANTLR: PHP. This is good news for ANTLR and great news for PHP, which has plenty of support for web-related stuff but usually lacks in good libraries for this kind of work. Now, PHP has a bad reputation, which was completely warranted a few years ago, but since the release of PHP 7 is no more true. It is still a very popular language and now a reliable choice. It also powers the most used CMS: WordPress. Think about it: now you could easily build a parsing plugin for WordPress. We are not saying that this is a good idea, but now you could do it. We all have to thank Marcos Passos for this.

C# Package

There is a fix for the C# package on Nuget to fix an assembly signature problem. This is in itself a small (although important) fix, however this is a good chance to talk about an issue with the C# Nuget packages. The people that follows ANTLR on C# knows that there are actually two ANTLR packages for C#: one is the standard, the other one is a C#-optimized version. You can read more about why that is in the C# Setup section of our ANTLR Mega Tutorial. The old C#-optimized version is still more popular, but you should really opt for the new ANTLR4 standard, unless you really care just about C#. That is because the standard version is more updated and it is completely in sync with the official ANTLR release: spread the word!

Improvement in the Compilation of the C++ Runtime

There is also an improvement regarding the development of the C++ target on Windows. Now the Visual Studio project to build the C++ target uses VS2017/2019 instead of VS2013/2015. This is a small change, but working with a real C++ project involve dealing with all the different versions of the C++ language, static and dynamic libraries, 32 and 64bit, debug and release versions. So, you may end up forced to build the target yourself to make a project compile, we know that by experience.

There is also now support for using Emscripten to compile the C++ runtime, so that is also good news.

Updates to the Swift Runtime

The last important news is the upgrade of the Swift runtime to support version 5 of Swift. Luckily the new version of Swift did not introduce big breaking changes to the language (as has happened in the past). So this is an important update and a no-brainer change.

Summary

ANTLR is the best tool to build parsers out there: it is well-tested, reliable enough to be used in an enterprise setting and usable enough so that you actually want to work with it. This release offers a few fixes and maintenance work. The big change however is the new target; now with one ANTLR grammar you can build parsers in:

• Java
• C#
• C++
• JavaScript
• Python 2 and 3
• Go
• Swift
• PHP
• Kotlin (with our experimental target)

That is a lot of languages, which means that you can learn the technology once and use it for all your parser needs.

Read more:

If you want to understand how to use ANTLR you can read our article The Mega Tutorial.