ANTLR v3 C# Code generator and Runtime library

Kunle Odutola
kunle UNDERSCORE odutola AT hotmail.com

Micheal Jordan

Status

As of April 2007, the C# code generator and runtime are compatible with ANTLR v3.0b8. They should be integrated into the depot (and hence appear on the daily builds) soon. As before, development proceeds sporadically due to other commitments.

The code generation templates and the runtime library itself are essentially feature complete with respect to the reference Java version. There are currently zero automated tests written and it isn't yet clear how such tests can/should be written (we suspect this applies to all the other targets too). In any case, some basic sanity check are done with samples grammars in the examples-v3 archive.

UPDATE: Just learned that some of the other targets have some automated unit tests already. We'll have a peek and see if this can be applied to C# too.

Architecture

The C# code generation and runtime are based on the Java version and would remain so until well after the final release. ANTLR 3 development (including AntlrWorks debugging support and some of the internal interfaces) is still so fluid that investing significant effort in developing radically different code output would be a little premature at this stage. That would be left as an exercise to the reader

Target Platforms

Microsoft .NET v1.1 and v2.0
Mono

Supported build tools

Microsoft Visual Studio 2003 and 2005
Nant v0.85

Performance

Should be easily faster than V2 C# code generation. We probably won't be able to outrun Jim Idle's C target output or Ric's C++ target but, we expect to be very competitive with the other targets.

Running

For generating C# code set "language=CSharp;" in the options block of your grammars.