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I have seen a fair few parser generators over the years, but it has been a long while since I have looked at anything that has been newly developed.

What improvements have been made to make them better? The problem domain seems pretty well defined and even 20 years ago the things that were changing felt like polishing off a few rough edges caused by earlier resource constraints.

I don't want to be dismissive and say "Why make this?" as a implied suggestion that it shouldn't have been made.

Nevertheless, Why make this? I assume there are good reasons for doing this that I am not aware of, what are they?

The Readme has a section for the raison d'être for it compared to the original ANTLR: https://github.com/antlr-ng/antlr-ng?tab=readme-ov-file#futu...

What is this project's relationship with antlr? I see a different name on the copyright and the github page suggests this is not a part of the antler project, while claiming to be the next generation.

If that's the case, I think it's misleading. It's fine to fork a project, but you don't get to call yourself the next generation of someone else's project.

Is antlr particularly popular these days? I was under the impression that most production parsers are some kind of handwritten recursive descent parsers, primarily because they're better at providing diagnostics and can sometimes be easier to maintain.

Has performance of ANTLR generated code gotten better? I'm sure some of this was bad grammars, but I wasn't thrilled with what I got out of ANTLR ~15 years ago

I'm a fan of antlr-ng. It's a solid upgrade if you're already using antlr. In my experience, they're fully compatible. antlr's ALL(*) parsing is relatively powerful for a parser generator, but it lacks support for incremental parsing. antlr-ng might improve things enough to be usable interactively in smaller settings, even if you need to reparse the document each time. It also comes with useful extensions like https://github.com/mike-lischke/antlr4-c3, which generates syntactic and semantic completions directly from the grammar.

I used ANTLR to create a grammar file for MK (Manufacturing Knowledge). I plugged the JavaScript parser and lexer into Ace editor. Good memories.

Why -ng ? I thought it had something to do with angular.