5. Migrating SDF2 grammars to SDF3 grammars

The conversion of SDF2 (.sdf) or template language (.tmpl) files into SDF3 can be done (semi) automatically.

For SDF2 files, it is possible to apply the Spoofax builder Lift to SDF3 to get a SDF3 file that corresponds to the SDF2 grammar. Another way of doing that is to apply the same builder to a definition (.def) file (in the include directory), that contains all SDF2 modules of your language. The result is a list of SDF3 files corresponding to all modules of your grammar. All SDF3 files are generated in the src-gen/sdf3-syntax directory.

For template language files with deprecated constructors, you can also apply the Lift to SDF3 builder, to convert the grammar into a SDF3 grammar in the src-gen/formatted directory.

Lift to SDF3 has two different versions: it can lift productions into templates or it can lift it into productive productions. In the case of wanting to have productive productions out of templates, the Extract productions builder can be used.