We Keep Coding

Is there a way to produce executables from an existing Antlr4 grammar within expressions from the user?

I've already an existing application, in which I use Antlr4 in order to declare a customized grammar, compile the .g4 files into our c# base parser and lexer and also I've implemented the visitors for expression parsing.
The question is about finding a way to change the behavior from interpretation to compilation.
The way the app works today, we receive an expression from our users (in the customized grammar format), pass it through Antlr4 implementations in order to get our visitors running and executing the expression. This is a very repetitive process, considering the same expression gets evaluated over and over with just different arguments, the implemented logic is just the same.
I'd like to ask about if I could compile the provided expression of my users, save the compiled artifact so I can load it up and call it instead of parsing their expressions every time.
This is similar I do with C# programming, considering that I produce a DLL file that will get loaded up and executed later, without needing to get interpreted every time (not considering JIT at this context ;).
Hope I made my self clear enough about that.
It's not a problem to change architecture for this implementation, so we do need a "facelift" on the project, because of performance issues. Our customers use to produce very large expressions, which take lots of memory to be parsed and are causing some issues at runtime.
Thanks a lot.

After some extra time analysing the implementation and also the usage we have of AntLr, I could see that even though I could find a way to compile expressions analysis, the output results wouldn't be executable for our scenario, because of many usages of local libraries.
The path I choose to run on was to create, dynamicaly, C# code while visiting AntLr expression navigation, through visit methods overrides and, later, compile this C# code into a memory assembly, so I can locate the execution class, create instance and invoke it's execute method. Also I'm using Rosyln to achieve this approach.

Implement Language Auto-Completion based on ANTLR4 Grammar

I am wondering if are there any examples (googling I haven't found any) of TAB auto-complete solutions for Command Line Interface (console), that use ANTLR4 grammars for predicting the next term (like in a REPL model).
I've written a PL/SQL grammar for an open source database, and now I would like to implement a command line interface to the database that provides the user the feature of completing the statements according to the grammar, or eventually discover the proper database object name to use (eg. a table name, a trigger name, the name of a column, etc.).
Thanks for pointing me to the right direction.

Actually it is possible! (Of course, based on the complexity of your grammar.) Problem with auto-completion and ANTLR is that you do not have complete expression and you want to parse it. If you would have complete expression, it wont be any big problem to know what kind of element is at what place and to know what can be used at such a place. But you do not have complete expression and you cannot parse the incomplete one. So what you need to do is to wrap the input into some wrapper/helper that will complete the expression to create a parse-able one. Notice that nothing that is added only to complete the expression is important to you - you will only ask for members up to last really written character.
So:
A) Create the wrapper that will change this (excel formula) '=If(' into '=If()'
B) Parse the wrapped input
C) Realize that you are in the IF function at the first parameter
D) Return all that can go into that place.
It actually works, I have completed intellisense editor for several simple languages. There is much more infrastructure than this, but the basic idea is as I wrote it. Only be careful, writing the wrapper is not easy if not impossible if the grammar is really complex. In that case look at Papa Carlo project. http://lakhin.com/projects/papa-carlo/

As already mentioned auto completion is based on the follow set at a given position, simply because this is what we defined in the grammar to be valid language. But that's only a small part of the task. What you need is context (as Sam Harwell wrote: it's a semantic process, not a syntactic one). And this information is independent of the parser. And since a parser is made to parse valid input (and during auto completion you have most of the time invalid input), it's not the right tool for this task.
Knowing what token can follow at a given position is useful to control the entire process (e.g. you don't want to show suggestions if only a string can appear), but is most of the time not what you actually want to suggest (except for keywords). If an ID is possible at the current position, it doesn't tell you what ID is actually allowed (a variable name? a namespace? etc.). So what you need is essentially 3 things:
A symbol table that provides you with all possible names sorted by scope. Creating this depends heavily on the parsed language. But this is a task where a parser is very helpful. You may want to cache this info as it is time consuming to run this analysis step.
Determine in which scope you are when invoking auto completion. You could use a parser as well here (maybe in conjunction with step 1).
Determine what type of symbol(s) you want to show. Many people think this is where a parser can give you all necessary information (the follow set). But as mentioned above that's not true (keywords aside).
In my blog post Universal Code Completion using ANTLR3 I especially addressed the 3rd step. There I don't use a parser, but simulate one, only that I don't stop when a parser would, but when the caret position is reached (so it is essential that the input must be valid syntax up to that point). After reaching the caret the collection process starts, which not only collects terminal nodes (for keywords) but looks at the rule names to learn what needs to be collected too. Using specific rule names is my way there to put context into the grammar, so when the collection code finds a rule table_ref it knows that it doesn't need to go further down the rule chain (to the ultimate ID token), but instead can use this information to provide a list of tables as suggestion.
With ANTLR4 things might become even simpler. I haven't used it myself yet, but the parser interpreter could be a big help here, as it essentially doing what I do manually in my implementation (with the ANTLR3 backend).

This is probably pretty hard to do.
Fundamentally you want to use some parser to predict "what comes next" to display as auto-completion. This has to at least predict what the FIRST token is at the point where the user's input stops.
For ANTLR, I think this will be very difficult. The reason is that ANTLR generates essentially procedural, recursive descent parsers. So at runtime, when you need to figure out what FIRST tokens are, you have to inspect the procedural source code of the generated parser. That way lies madness.
This blog entry claims to achieve autocompletion by collecting error reports rather than inspecting the parser code. Its sort of an interesting idea, but I do not understand how his method really works, and I cannot see how it would offer all possible FIRST tokens; it might acquire some of them. This SO answer confirms my intuition.
Sam Harwell discusses how he has tackled this; he is one of the ANTLR4 implementers and if anybody can make this work, he can. It wouldn't surprise me if he reached inside ANTLR to extract the information he needs; as an ANTLR implementer he would certainly know where to tap in. You are not likely to be so well positioned. Even so, he doesn't really describe what he did in detail. Good luck replicating. You might ask him what he really did.
What you want is a parsing engine for which that FIRST token information is either directly available (the parser generator could produce it) or computable based on the parser state. This is actually possible to do with bottom up parsers such as LALR(k); you can build an algorithm that walks the state tables and computes this information. (We do this with our DMS Software Reengineering Toolkit for its GLR parser precisely to produce syntax error reports that say "missing token, could be any of these [set]")

Reflection or Regex on Custom attributes

I have seen Attributes and Reflection and now i know how to create and use reflection to see meta data of attribute but is it possible to make a standalone tool that can analyse a cs file and extract attributes used ?
What am I trying to do?
Basically I am working on a tool which takes C# code as input. Next step is to see what Attributes are used in that source code. Extract Intrinsic and Custom Attributes.
Probem?
this makes sense if you are using reflection in same project in which your attributes are defined, however I do not know in what direction I should move to write a separate tool that can give you above extracted statics and meta data of attributes.
Some say I should use Regex to extract the attributes in files where as other say I need to use Irony - .NET Language Implementation Kit
Furthermore
above work will result me to have an application that will be used for attributes(annotation) based Design Pattern Recovery from Source Code. I have less idea if Regex would come to rescue or i need something like Reflection. As Reflection is deals with runtime. I do not have to deal with run time. just static files analysis

If I properly understood your problem, you really need to parse your code. Regex won't help you, as beside parsing attributes you will need to parse class hierarchy. Reflection might do the trick, but you won't be able to show to the user the results. So, the best idea is to use any parser to get an expression tree from the source, and than investigate it.
If you don't know which parser to choose - I'd recommend Rosalyn, as it should be easiest for parsing C# code (it is designed especially for it). You can find an example for parsing here:
http://blog.filipekberg.se/2011/10/20/using-roslyn-to-parse-c-code-files/
I think it should be really powerful and useful for your task

Apparently I don't have enough reputation to comment, so I'm gonna have to say this as an answer.
Reflection deals with Runtime Type Information. It is a mechanism for finding out things about a type that you the programmer don't already know about (perhaps someone else is providing you a code library, and forgot to document it). Reflection will give you any information you need about the public contract of a class, including methods, properties, fields, attributes, and interfaces/classes inherited.
What you need however is a parser. A parser is a standard programming concept that processes files and extracts specific information. You are looking for information in code files, which are not runtime types yet, which means reflection has no information on them yet, however you have your eyes, since they're still code files. In the event your eyes are not sufficient (as I suspect their not if you asked the question) you need to write a parser. Extracting specific information from a cs file is pretty simple. And the regex for an attribute is: \[.+\]

code snippets interpretation

Let's say I have a WinForm App...written in C#.
Is it possible?

After all, put my eye on Iron Python.

C# is not interpreted, so unlike javascript or other interpreted languages you can't do that natively. You can go four basic routes, listed here in order of least to most complex...
1) Provide a fixed set of operations that the user can apply. Parse the user's input, or provide checkboxes or other UI elements to indicate that a given operation should be applied.
2) Provide a plugin-based or otherwise dynamically defined set of operations. Like #1, this has the advantage of not needing special permissions like full trust. MEF might come in handy for this approach: http://mef.codeplex.com/
3) Use a dynamic c# compilation framework like paxScript: http://eco148-88394.innterhost.net/paxscriptnet/. This would, in theory, allow you to compile small c# snippets on demand.
4) Use IL Emit statements to parse code and generate your operations on the fly. This is by far the most complex solution, likely requires full trust, and is extremely error prone. I don't recommend it unless you have some very obscure requirements and sophisticated users.

The CSharpCodeProvider class will do what you want. For a (VERY outdated, but still working with a few tweaks) example of its use, check out CSI.

If you are willing to consider targeting the Mono runtime, the type Mono.CSharp.Evaluator provides an API for evaluating C# expressions and statements at runtime.

How to identify what state variables are read/written in a given method in C#

What is the simplest way to identify if a given method is reading or writing a member variable or property?
I am writing a tool to assist in an RPC system, in which access to remote objects is expensive. Being able to detect if a given object is not used in a method could allow us to avoid serializing its state. Doing it on source code is perfectly reasonable (but being able to do it on compiled code would be amazing)
I think I can either write my own simple parser, I can try to use one of the existing C# parsers and work with the AST. I am not sure if it is possible to do this with Assemblies using Reflection. Are there any other ways? What would be the simplest?
EDIT: Thanks for all the quick replies. Let me give some more information to make the question clearer. I definitely prefer correct, but it definitely shouldn't be extremely complex. What I mean is that we can't go too far checking for extremes or impossibles (as the passed-in delegates that were mentioned, which is a great point). It would be enough to detect those cases and assume everything could be used and not optimize there. I would assume that those cases would be relatively uncommon.
The idea is for this tool to be handed to developers outside of our team, that should not be concerned about this optimization. The tool takes their code and generates proxies for our own RPC protocol. (we are using protobuf-net for serialization only, but no wcf nor .net remoting). For this reason, anything we use has to be free or we wouldn't be able to deploy the tool for licensing issues.

You can have simple or you can have correct - which do you prefer?
The simplest way would be to parse the class and the method body. Then identify the set of tokens which are properties and field names of the class. The subset of those tokens which appears in the method body are the properties and field names you care about.
This trivial analysis of course is not correct. If you had
class C
{
int Length;
void M() { int x = "".Length; }
}
Then you would incorrectly conclude that M references C.Length. That's a false positive.
The correct way to do it is to write a full C# compiler, and use the output of its semantic analyzer to answer your question. That's how the IDE implements features like "go to definition".

Before attempting to write this kind of logic yourself, I would check to see if you can leverage NDepend to meet your needs.
NDepend is a code dependency analysis tool ... and much more. It implements a sophisticated analyzer for examining relationships between code constructs and should be able to answer that question. It also operates on both source and IL, if I'm not mistaken.
NDepend exposes CQL - Code Query Language - which allows you to write SQL-like queries against the relationships between structures in your code. NDepend has some support for scripting and is capable of being integrated with your build process.

To complete the LBushkin answer on NDepend (Disclaimer: I am one of the developer of this tool), NDepend can indeed help you on that. The Code LINQ Query (CQLinq) below, actually match methods that...
shouldn't provoque any RPC calls but
that are reading/writing any fields of any RPC types,
or that are reading/writing any properties of any RPC types,
Notice how first we define the 4 sets: typesRPC, fieldsRPC, propertiesRPC, methodsThatShouldntUseRPC - and then we match methods that violate the rule. Of course this CQLinq rule needs to be adapted to match your own typesRPC and methodsThatShouldntUseRPC:
warnif count > 0
// First define what are types whose call are RDC
let typesRPC = Types.WithNameIn("MyRpcClass1", "MyRpcClass2")
// Define instance fields of RPC types
let fieldsRPC = typesRPC.ChildFields()
.Where(f => !f.IsStatic).ToHashSet()
// Define instance properties getters and setters of RPC types
let propertiesRPC = typesRPC.ChildMethods()
.Where(m => !m.IsStatic && (m.IsPropertyGetter || m.IsPropertySetter))
.ToHashSet()
// Define methods that shouldn't provoke RPC calls
let methodsThatShouldntUseRPC =
Application.Methods.Where(m => m.NameLike("XYZ"))
// Filter method that should do any RPC call
// but that is using any RPC fields (reading or writing) or properties
from m in methodsThatShouldntUseRPC.UsingAny(fieldsRPC).Union(
methodsThatShouldntUseRPC.UsingAny(propertiesRPC))
let fieldsRPCUsed = m.FieldsUsed.Intersect(fieldsRPC )
let propertiesRPCUsed = m.MethodsCalled.Intersect(propertiesRPC)
select new { m, fieldsRPCUsed, propertiesRPCUsed }

My intuition is that detecting which member variables will be accessed is the wrong approach. My first guess at a way to do this would be to just request serialized objects on an as-needed basis (preferably at the beginning of whatever function needs them, not piecemeal). Note that TCP/IP (i.e. Nagle's algorithm) should stuff these requests together if they are made in rapid succession and are small

Eric has it right: to do this well, you need what amounts to a compiler front end. What he didn't emphasize enough is the need for strong flow analysis capabilities (or a willingness to accept very conservative answers possibly alleviated by user annotations). Maybe he meant that in the phrase "semantic analysis" although his example of "goto definition" just needs a symbol table, not flow analysis.
A plain C# parser could only be used to get very conservative answers (e.g., if method A in class C contains identifier X, assume it reads class member X; if A contains no calls then you know it can't read member X).
The first step beyond this is having a compiler's symbol table and type information (if method A refers to class member X directly, then assume it reads member X; if A contains **no* calls and mentions identifier X only in the context of accesses to objects which are not of this class type then you know it can't read member X). You have to worry about qualified references, too; Q.X may read member X if Q is compatible with C.
The sticky point are calls, which can hide arbitrary actions. An analysis based on just parsing and symbol tables could determine that if there are calls, the arguments refer only to constants or to objects which are not of the class which A might represent (possibly inherited).
If you find an argument that has an C-compatible class type, now you have to determine whether that argument can be bound to this, requiring control and data flow analysis:
method A( ) { Object q=this;
...
...q=that;...
...
foo(q);
}
foo might hide an access to X. So you need two things: flow analysis to determine whether the initial assignment to q can reach the call foo (it might not; q=that may dominate all calls to foo), and call graph analysis to determine what methods foo might actually invoke, so that you can analyze those for accesses to member X.
You can decide how far you want to go with this simply making the conservative assumption "A reads X" anytime you don't have enough information to prove otherwise. This will you give you a "safe" answer (if not "correct" or what I'd prefer to call "precise").
Of frameworks that might be helpful, you might consider Mono, which surely parses and builds symbol tables. I don't know what support it provides for flow analysis or call graph extraction; I would not expect the Mono-to-IL front-end compiler to do a lot of that, as people usually hide that machinery in the JIT part of JIT-based systems. A downside is that Mono may be behind the "modern C#" curve; last time I heard, it handled only C# 2.0 but my information may be stale.
An alternative is our DMS Software Reengineering Toolkit and its C# Front End.
(Not an open source product).
DMS provides general source code parsing, tree building/inspection/analysis, general symbol table support and built-in machinery for implementing control-flow analysis, data flow analysis, points-to analysis (needed for "What does object O point to?"), and call graph construction. This machinery has all been tested by fire with DMS's Java and C front ends, and the symbol table support has been used to implement full C++ name and type resolution, so its pretty effective. (You don't want to underestimate the work it takes to build all that machinery; we've been working on DMS since 1995).
The C# Front End provides for full C# 4.0 parsing and full tree building. It presently does not build symbol tables for C# (we're working on this) and that's a shortcoming compared to Mono. With such a symbol table, however, you would have access to all that flow analysis machinery (which has been tested with DMS's Java and C front ends) and that might be a big step up from Mono if it doesn't provide that.
If you want to do this well, you have a considerable amount of work in front of you. If you want to stick with "simple", you'll have to do with just parsing the tree and being OK with being very conservative.
You didn't say much about knowing if a method wrote to a member. If you are going to minimize traffic the way you describe, you want to distinguish "read", "write" and "update" cases and optimize messages in both directions. The analysis is obviously pretty similar for the various cases.
Finally, you might consider processing MSIL directly to get the information you need; you'll still have the flow analysis and conservative analysis issues. You might find the following technical paper interesting; it describes a fully-distributed Java object system that has to do the same basic analysis you want to do,
and does so, IIRC, by analyzing class files and doing massive byte code rewriting.
Java Orchestra System

By RPC do you mean .NET Remoting? Or DCOM? Or WCF?
All of these offer the opportunity to monitor cross process communication and serialization via sinks and other constructs, but they are all platform specific, so you'll need to specify the platform...

You could listen for the event that a property is being read/written to with an interface similar to INotifyPropertyChanged (although you obviously won't know which method effected the read/write.)

I think the best you can do is explicitly maintain a dirty flag.