"ANTLR instead is more actively developed. It has been re-written from scratch a few times during the years, so the code has is of good quality."
... rewrites improve code quality ... right ... right???
... rewrites improve code quality ... right ... right???
But every time I take a new look at Antlr there's a huge amount of issues related to the fact that they have a huge new rewrite deprecating old versions while the new version is not ready: entirely new ways of doing things with missing documentation and examples, incomplete or missing language backends, and missing packaging for various Linux distributions.
What I get from it is: Antlr is a very powerful project... if you're in the Java ecosystem and if you're willing to use old no longer supported versions.
Otherwise, questionable choice.
I fire it up, play around a bit, and did a calculator example or something like that. The next step, I figure, is to get it to generate some C code so I can test it on the device. Turns out ANTLR4 has dropped the C backend entirely! C++ is, currently, a no-go for the project, so... I guess I’m out of luck there.
Pleasantly, in a discussion with a friend, he asked the silly question: “couldn’t you parse those strings with sscanf()?”. I blinked in disbelief, wrote the tiniest parser to split the input on newlines, and sscanf() did the trick.
So after years of rolling my own, I finally decided I would never do that again. All the off-by-one errors, difficult-to-diagnose failures and endless fiddling is out of my life now. I just use a parser tool.