javac, meet ANTLR; ANTLR, meet javac

A while back, we created a new OpenJDK project, Compiler Grammar, so that we could investigate integrating an ANTLR grammar for Java into javac. Thanks to some hard work by our intern Yang Jiang, with assistance from Terence Parr, the initial results of that work are now available. The grammar currently supports Java version 1.5, although the goal is to fully support the -source option and support older (and newer) versions of the language as well. Right now, the performance is slower than that of standard javac, so this will not be the default lexer and parser for javac for a... [read full story]