Comparison of Leading Language Parsers – ANTLR, JavaCC, SableCC, Tree-sitter, Yacc, Bison

Software engineering applications in domains like embedded systems and health care have increased exponentially during the last few years. Developing, analyzing, and customization of languages is one of the core software engineering aspects. This usually involves lexical, syntactical, and semantic operations, technically termed parsing. For this, several parsers have been introduced in state-of-the-art. However, due to diverse features, selecting a parser for a particular operation during software engineering applications is always problematic. In this article, we identified six leading parsers (i.e., ANTLR, JavaCC, SableCC, Tree-sitter, Yacc, and Bison) from the state-of-the-art. Furthermore, we also identified significant parser features to perform meaningful comparative analysis. Results indicate that ANTLR and JavaCC provide enhanced parsing features, such as the parsing algorithm and the extended grammar notation. However, JavaCC is suitable for simple grammar definition, whereas ANTLR allows specifying complex grammar with multiple alternative paths. The findings of this article are highly beneficial for researchers and practitioners while selecting the right parser to perform specific software engineering tasks.

I. Introduction

In recent years, software engineering has witnessed a remarkable surge in the utilization of software applications across various domains, including the rapidly evolving field of embedded systems and healthcare, etc. Within software engineering, one of the core aspects is developing, analyzing, and customizing programming languages [1] . These activities often involve parsing. Parsing refers to analyzing the source code’s structure based on a given set of rules or grammar [2] . Parsers are created manually or by parser generators. They use a lexer, also known as a lexical analyzer, to identify the terminal symbols of a specified language, breaking it down into smaller units such as tokens or abstract syntax trees (ASTs) and verifying that they conform to the language’s syntax and semantics [3] . Parsing involves several sub-tasks performed sequentially or in parallel, depending on the algorithm. The first three tasks in Fig. 1 represent the main sub-tasks of parsing: lexical analysis, syntactic analysis, and semantic analysis [4] .