Two new Eclipse projects: Xpect and Xsemantics

Yesterday, two new Eclipse projects had been created:

• Eclipse Xpect
• Eclipse Xsemantics

Both project are around for quite some time and they both are based on Eclipse Xtext, the famous framework to create editors with all state-of-the-art features (parser, linker, validators, content assist, etc.) for your own textual DSLs, simply based on a grammar.

Xpect is written by Moritz Eysholdt, who is also a committer of Xtext. It is a unit- and integration-testing framework to be used for Xtext-based languages. Instead of writing fiddly JUnit tests, you can simply write things like

// XPECT errors --> "cannot divide two strings"
"hello" / "world"

assuming your language supports division, strings, and types.

And types is the topic of Xsemantics, written by Lorenzo Bettini, author of the book "Implementing DSLs with Xtext and Xtend". It is a DSL (implemented in Xtext itself) for writing type systems, reduction rules, interpreters and general relation rules for languages implemented in Xtext. So you can write rules like that:

rule subtypeUnion_Left
 G|- UnionTypeExpression U <: TypeRef S
from {
 U.typeRefs.forall[T| G |- T <: S]
}

Well, you probably need to know type theory a little bit to see the beauty in that.

Both of these frameworks are heavily used by Eclipse N4JS: it contains more than 10.000 Xpect tests (e.g., all specification tests) and a Java 8 like type system defined in Xsemantics, and this is also why I act as kind of "assisting project lead" to help the original authors to bring these great tools to Eclipse. The authors and the N4JS team at enfore are now working on bringing the code to Eclipse as soon as possible, to simplify the usage of these frameworks for all Xtext users!

Keep on modelling!

I once said that modelling without graphical editors is like Tour de France without mountains. Well, I have to correct myself: a great test suite and a complicated type system are just as exciting ;-)