What is the most distinct feature of Iguana?

Iguana natively supports data-dependent grammars. This means the the user can use the powerful features of data-dependent grammars to define parsers that support context-sensitive constructs, without needing to manually write a parser.

What is the difference between Iguana and ANTLR 4?

ANTLR 4 supports all context-free grammars except the ones with indirect/hidden left recursion, and has worst case O(n4) runtime. Iguana, on the other hand, supports all context-free grammars and is worst-case O(n3) on context-free grammars. For parsing real programming languages, though, these limitations of ANTLR do not matter. In fact, ANTLR is much much faster on real grammars compared to Iguana.

Iguana is a general parser: it supports all context-free grammars and delivers all parse trees in a compact form (SPPF). Iguana supports explicit disambiguation rules, which can be partially applied. ANTLR, on the other hand, will deliver at most one parse tree. This means that it resolves ambiguities while parsing, in favor of the first alternative. Iguana also provides full support for data-dependent grammars, while ANLTR supports only few data dependency features, e.g., semantic predicates, to enable expression of context-sensitive constructs. Therefore, it is fair to conclude that the internal machinery of Iguana is more heavyweight than ANTLR. Moreover, ANTLR is a mature open source tool, while Iguana is still mostly a research platform. We expect to reduce the gap between Iguana and ANTLR's performance in the future, but most likely, Iguana will never be as fast as ANTLR, although it can be more expressive in some tasks.

What is the difference between data-dependent grammars and parser combinators?

Data-dependent grammars is a formalism that unifies many ideas about directing parsing actions based on data of a previous parse. These ideas come from parser combinators, attribute grammars, attribute directed parsing, to name a few. Therefore, it is not surprising to see similarities between data-dependent grammars and other parsing systems.

In particular, monadic parser combinators allow threading of values through sequence combinators. These features has been used in parsing network protocols and indentation-sensitive languages. As parser combinators are ordinary functions, the user has a lot of freedom to write parsers. In contrast data-dependent grammars still have a flavor of a grammar and give more control for syntax definition.

Finally, traditional parser combinators do not support left-recursive rules and can have worst-case exponential runtime. We also have a general parser combinator library, Meerkat, that supports left-recursive rules and provides a cubic runtime guarantee. Using the Meerkat library, one can express data-dependency, directly in Scala.