Issues

Performance

javac using Java.g is significantly slower than using the standard parser. The are two potential solutions.

The following table measures the performance of the ANTLR javac compiler against that the standard compiler. Two bodies of code were tested:

For each body of code, the following measurements were taken:

Times in the following table are in seconds; for the first three rows, the times were measured as elapsed time using System.currentTimeMillis(); for the full build, the times were measured with the Unix time command, using the sum of user time and system time.

langtools jdk
standard javac ANTLR javac / standard javac ANTLR javac /
lex source files 0.111 1.223 11.02 18.181 190.54 10.48
lex and parse source files 0.366 2.609 7.12 47.123 346.34 7.35
compile source files 9.176 18.730 2.04 84.481 168.161 1.99
full build 47.915 58.751 1.23 487.68 574.96 1.17

Although the ANTLR lexer and parser are significantly slower than their hand-written counterparts, the impact is ameliorated in the context of typical real world usage.

Error handling

The error messages generated by ANTLR are typically not as detailed as those generated by the standard parser, which can often give more hints about what is expected at any point.

The standard parser has features that make it suitable for use in an IDE like NetBeans, that are not necessarily required for a batch compiler. In particular, it has support for improved error recovery, after a syntax error has been found, and it has support for retaining valid subtrees in the context of a syntax error. For example, consider this input:

for (int i = 0; i < 10; i++) ?

The trees for "int i = 0;", "i < 10", and "i++" should not necessarily be discarded just because there is an error in the body of the for-loop. In a case like this, the standard parser will return an ErrorTree containing any trees which were successfully parsed before the syntax error was discovered. This allows an IDE to analyze those trees even though the complete statement is syntactially malformed.

Interaction with IDEs and other tools

While not encouraged or necessarily supported, some downstream clients of javac may depend on internal API, such as the lexer and parser classes. The clients may be significantly affected by a change to using an ANTLR-based lexer and parser.