Author: Ken Domino

After several months of work, I’ve finally released version 5 of the Visual Studio 2019 extension for Antlr, AntlrVSIX. This version is a re-architecture of the code using a Language Server Protocol implementation. The extension is slimmer because it now only focuses on support for Antlr grammars and removes some of the features that LSP does not support (e.g., “go to listener/visitor” and colorized tagging). However, I now have added a template for creating C++ Antlr programs (in addition to the familiar C# Antlr template). The templates use an updated version of the msbuild rules and tool in Antlr4BuildTasks that works for csproj and vcxproj files (C# and C++ projects, respectively). There is a Net Core template in Antlr4BuildTasks.Templates as well. –Ken

The next step in the development of my LSP server for Antlr involves support for code completion. There is an API written by Mike Lischke that computes the lookahead sets from the parser tables and input, but it turns out to have a bug in some situations. So, I’ll now describe the algorithms I wrote to compute the lookahead set for Antlr parsers. I’ll start first with a few definitions, then go over the three algorithms that do the computation. An implementation of this is available in C# in the Antlrvsix extension for code completion and another is provided by default in the Antlr Net Core templates I wrote for syntax error messages.

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For those interested in creating an Antlr4 program using C#, I wrote a dotnet package and uploaded it to Nuget. There is similar functionality in the VS2019 extension AntlrVSIX, but I am starting to move towards a Language Server Protocol client/server implementation for Antlr. This package capitalizes on the work I did with Antlr4BuildTasks supporting MSBUILD builds using the Java Antlr tool v4.7.2.

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Continuing with my work in making Antlrvsix a Language Server Protocol server implementation, I created another extension for Visual Studio 2019 that uses the client API Microsoft.VisualStudio.LanguageServer.Client, this time with the Clangd LSP server. The extension source code is here. But, there is a hitch…

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Continuing with my work in making Antlrvsix a Language Server Protocol server implementation, I created an extension for Visual Studio 2019 that uses the client API Microsoft.VisualStudio.LanguageServer.Client with the Eclipse Java Language Server Protocol implementation. This extension follows the steps outlined in an old article on creating LSP clients in Visual Studio. The extension source code is here. The code has been updated so that the only requirement is that you have the Java runtime downloaded and installed, and JAVA_HOME set to the top-level directory of the Java runtime. The code will prompt you for the path and warn you that it isn’t set properly.

Even as noted in the old MS documentation page, many of the client features are enabled, e.g., go to def, find all refs, reformat, hover, and typing completions. What is missing is building and debugging. But it is very usable.

After wasting a bit of time the last few days, I figured out how to get the Gnu Emacs editor to work with the Omnisharp-Roslyn LSP server for C#. Finding the right solution required a lot of trial and error work because I work mainly on Windows, and that is completely sacrilegious.

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This is an article about my ongoing research regarding the state of Antlr grammars for parsing Java. Some of the tests are taking weeks of computing time, so the results are preliminary.

Antlr is a popular LL(*) parser generator for recognizers of C#, Java, and many other programming languages. For Java, there are three grammars available on the Antlr grammar website: Java, Java8, and Java9. If you are a developer who hasn’t followed the maintenance history, it is unclear which grammar one should choose. Some of the changes that have been made to one grammar have not been applied to the other grammars. The basis for all grammars, however, is The Java Language Specification. Unfortunately, the latest available now is version 13 making all of them out of date.

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Surprise! I’ve been implementing something like the Language Server Protocol (LSP) with AntlrVSIX. The LSP is an abstraction for an editor (ed) using JSON as the lingua franca between the editor and a GUI client. The editor server: offers the persistence of code files; organizes files in a “workspace”; provides an API for edits, tagging, go to def, find all refs, reformat, code completion, defs for tooltips, etc. LSP is a step in the right direction because it separates an editor server backend from a GUI frontend, which is what AntlrVSIX is about.

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After a lot of hemming and hawing, I am now adding the concept of “workspaces” to AntlrVSIX. By this I mean an equivalent of workspaces that is defined in Roslyn. In AntlrVSIX, a Document will be a source file; a Project will be a collection of Documents; a program will be a Workspace, a collection of Projects. Properties on a Project or Document are copied to the equivalent AntlrVSIX object as a property list.

I’ve been busy extending AntlrVSIX to include new features and correct bugs. Some of the things added with the 40 or so changes since the beginning of September are:

• Persistent option settings;
• Tagging of Java symbols using a symbol table;
• Improved reformatter for languages;
• Improved symbol click-on highlighter;
• Improved co-existence with other extensions.

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