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.
The reason for this is clear if you consider what constitutes a program for languages like C# or Java. But, Antlr has a similar issue: a grammar can be “imported” into another, and the scope of the grammar symbols is local to the project.
This required a lot of changes to AntlrVSIX, and will be released as v4.0. Although there aren’t many new features, it is a significant change nonetheless.
Note: I found that obtaining the property lists for the older csproj formats very, very slow, while the newer format much faster. For AntlrVSIX itself in VS 2019, it takes an additional 10 seconds if I query the property lists for the 10 projects contained in the solution. Investigating this with the profiler, I found that querying the Value of a property runs especially slow. I now only query the FullPath property and ignore the others. I’m planning on performing a lazy evaluation of EnvDTE properties for properties in general because the Microsoft code that performs the parsing and semantic analysis of build files is exceedingly slow.
–Ken