SSLR stands for SonarSource Language Recognizer, this is a lightweight java library which provides all the required material to analyse any piece of source code. For the time being, by using SSLR we can quickly create a lexer, a parser and some AST visitors to implement for instance some quality rules or to compute some measures.
Why Another Tool for Language Recognition, why not reusing Open Source and well-know libraries like Antlr or javacc ? This is the first question asked by any developer discovering SSLR. Of course this option was seriously studied and had bid advantages but we decided to start from scratch for the following reasons :
- The Sonar team is TDD addict and we think that existing tools don't fit well with TDD as they require some code generation and doesn't provide any simple and quick way to unit test all part of a source code analyser like a parsing rule for instance.
- The Sonar team is KISS addict and so we think that a java developer should be able to do anything from its favorite java IDE and so should be able to do anything in java.
- This technology is also used to analyse some legacy languages like COBOL for instance which require some very specific lexing and preprocessing features. Implementing those features would have required to fully master the implementation of those existing tools and so we didn't benefit from a black box approach.
- In any case, the ultimate goal of SSLR is to provide a complete stack for source code analyzing which goes far beyond parsing. SSLR will sooner or later provide out-of-the-box the required material to :
- Feed and request a symbolic table
- Feed and visit a control flow graph
- Feed and request a complete graph of dependencies
- No special steps for your build process.
- No "untouchable" generated code.
Full expressive power of Parsing Expression Grammars for parser creation
- Definition of grammar directly in code using Java.
- No break in IDE support (syntax highlighting, code navigation, refactoring, etc).