Maybe it's just my skill level, but I've used both hand-rolled recursive-descent and ANTLR for the same project (Thrift parser), and hoo boy I would never go back to recursive-descent for that. ANTLR shrank my code by an order of magnitude, and cleaned up some bugs too.
I'd be willing to believe that beyond a certain level of input complexity, ANTLR no longer pays for itself. In my experience, there exists a class of languages for which there's no better tool.
I'd be willing to believe that beyond a certain level of input complexity, ANTLR no longer pays for itself. In my experience, there exists a class of languages for which there's no better tool.