writing a newer simpler ANTLR plugin
Submitted by Kristof Szabados
Link to original bug (#568444)
Description
Not exactly a TITAN improvement, but would help getting started and working with the Eclipse plugins a bit easier.
The current open source ANTLR plugin we use is very nice for being open source and offering lots of features.
Sadly it also has some drawbacks:
- most importantly it is built on a specific version of XTEXT, which is very much outdated and makes getting started with the plugins unnecessarily hard.
- The behavior is full of bugs, for example adding a new antlr version as external compiler ... removes all versions of external compilers set from their list (but actually works fine in the background)
- The plugin always tries to update the .gitignore files of folders where it generates its output (instead of on file level, effectively hiding whole folders). As we keep the input files in the same folder, for consistency, this resulted several times in commits that missed a few files from these folders.
- Most of the offered features we don't actually need and for example code checking and completion support in the editor is so slow, we recommend editing that file in a text editor instead.
Creating our own open source plugin to support ANTLR could actually be very easy:
- we only need to be able to configure which external compiler needs to be called for the g4 files to compile them.
- we need to set some dependency for the configuration files, to make sure they are built in the correct order. But as this is a very simple hierarchy, if we could add just 1 preference page to each g4 file, with the option to select a single file it depends on ... this would be enough during build time, to create the right build order.
- There is no need for syntax highlight, semantic checking or any advanced editor features ... since we currently have to use text editors anyways.
Version: 7.1.0