ANTLR Parser Generator

ANTLR (ANother Tool for Language Recognition) is a powerful parser generator for reading, processing, executing, or translating structured text or binary files. Created by Terence Parr in 1989 at Purdue University, ANTLR has over 17,000 stars as of 2026 and is used by Twitter for search query parsing, Elasticsearch for query DSL, Hibernate for HQL, Presto for SQL parsing, and Apple's Swift compiler. Key features include: LL(*) parsing (ANTLR's adaptive algorithm providing the simplicity of LL parsing with the power of LR, generating recursive-descent parsers that are easy to read and debug), grammar inheritance (extending existing grammars for specialized parsers), lexer and parser generation (from a single combined grammar or separate grammars), multi-language code generation (Java, C#, Python, C++, Go, JavaScript, TypeScript, PHP, Swift, Dart), left-recursion support (directly supporting left-recursive rules without manual refactoring), tree construction (automatically building parse trees with visitor and listener patterns), semantic predicates (runtime conditions for context-sensitive parsing), error handling (sophisticated recovery with inline error reporting, token deletion, and insertion), ANTLR4 runtime (lightweight libraries for each target language), IntelliJ plugin (grammar development with live parse tree visualization), and built-in profiling for identifying grammar bottlenecks.