[jcuenod]

Honestly, antlr made this pretty straightforward to me. I didn't want to work in java, but they have a ton of targets. You can definitely write it all yourself, and that's a great learning exercise. But I wanted to get a parser for a language idea I had in mind and it took a couple of days with antlr (https://github.com/chicory-lang/chicory)

[sieve]

Problem with these tools is, you have to spend time wrangling them instead of learning to write a lexer/parser yourself.

A recursive-descent parser is a beautiful thing and can be implemented very quickly.