Every few years I look at the latest parser combinators, parser generators, compiler compilers. And every time they seem to lack in some huge vital way (not always all of them, but always at least 1):
* Error handling always ends up being non-existent or of the quality of "begin, for, if, while, repeat, identifier, number, float expected" with no good way to override what happens
* Recovery is usually impossible
* Parser generator generates a full model that doesn't match what we need
* Working around the quirks of the input language ends up being more tricky than hand writing (almost every language has some ambigiuty)
* Slow: With ANTLR it's really easy to make it do gigantic amount of look aheads in complex languages, which isn't even really needed
I always end up going back to a simple hand crafted parser which is easier to read and write.
* Error handling always ends up being non-existent or of the quality of "begin, for, if, while, repeat, identifier, number, float expected" with no good way to override what happens
* Recovery is usually impossible
* Parser generator generates a full model that doesn't match what we need
* Working around the quirks of the input language ends up being more tricky than hand writing (almost every language has some ambigiuty)
* Slow: With ANTLR it's really easy to make it do gigantic amount of look aheads in complex languages, which isn't even really needed
I always end up going back to a simple hand crafted parser which is easier to read and write.