Release 5 of AntlrVSIX

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 …

Parsing with Augmented Transition Networks and computing lookahead

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 …

New — Antlr4BuildTasks.Templates

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 …

Getting VS2019 to work with the Clangd LSP server

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…

Getting VS2019 working with the Eclipse Java LSP server

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 …

A note on getting Gnu Emacs working with Omnisharp-Roslyn LSP server

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.

A comparison of Antlr grammars for parsing Java

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 …

Notes on Language Server Protocol

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, …

Adding “workspaces” to AntlrVSIX

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 …