Language-independent development environment support for dynamic runtimes

Stolpe, Daniel; Felgentreff, Tim; Humer, Christian; Niephaus, Fabio; Hirschfeld, Robert

doi:10.1145/3359619.3359746

Cited by 3 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 18 publications

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“…Overall, we find that the effort needed to implement IDEspecific support is minimal when using the approach proposed by Stolpe et al [2019].…”

Section: A Language-agnostic Design Of Amentioning

confidence: 88%

“…Execution-Based Language Server Since we rely on Stolpe et al [2019]'s work, this section briefly summarizes their approach and what a language implementer needs to do to benefit from it.…”

Section: A Language-agnostic Design Of Amentioning

confidence: 99%

“…While not mentioned in Stolpe et al [2019], providing code lenses for such scenarios should be trivial, since it already relies on unit tests to harvest information for the IDE.…”

Section: Informational Featuresmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Soon after the LSP was announced, we started wondering 2 how one could utilize language implementation frameworks such as Truffle [Würthinger et al 2012] to not just make it simpler to have IDE support for a language in many different editors and IDEs with a single implementation, but simplify the creation of such language servers by identifying the language-agnostic parts. Stolpe et al [2019] built a first version of such a system for the Truffle language framework, which was adapted and released as the GraalVM Language Server. 3 Their key idea was to utilize the instrumentation [ Van de Vanter et al 2018] and language interoperability [Grimmer et al 2018] features of the Truffle framework to enable IDE features.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This section reviews the language server protocol, discuss alternative approaches such as language workbenches, and summarizes the work by Stolpe et al [2019].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Execution vs. Parse-Based Language Servers: Tradeoffs and Opportunities for Language-Agnostic Tooling for Dynamic Languages

Marr

Burchell

Niephaus

2022

Proceedings of the 18th ACM SIGPLAN International Symposium on Dynamic Languages

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With the wide adoption of the language server protocol, the desire to have IDE-style tooling even for niche and research languages has exploded. The Truffle language framework facilitates this desire by offering an almost zero-effort approach to language implementers to providing IDE features. However, this existing approach needs to execute the code being worked on to capture much of the information needed for an IDE, ideally with full unit-test coverage.To capture information more reliably and avoid the need to execute the code being worked on, we propose a new parse-based design for language servers. Our solution provides a language-agnostic interface for structural information, with which we can support most common IDE features for dynamic languages.Comparing the two approaches, we find that our new parse-based approach requires only a modest development effort for each language and has only minor tradeoffs for precision, for instance for code completion, compared to Truffle's execution-based approach.Further, we show that less than 1,000 lines of code capture enough details to provide much of the typical IDE functionality, with an order of magnitude less code than ad hoc language servers. We tested our approach for the custom parsers of Newspeak and SOM, as well as SimpleLanguage's ANTLR grammar without any changes to it. Combining both parse and execution-based approaches has the potential to provide good and precise IDE tooling for a wide range of languages with only small development effort. By itself, our approach would be a good addition to the many libraries implementing the language server protocol to enable low-effort implementations of IDE features.

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“…Overall, we find that the effort needed to implement IDEspecific support is minimal when using the approach proposed by Stolpe et al [2019].…”

Section: A Language-agnostic Design Of Amentioning

confidence: 88%

“…Execution-Based Language Server Since we rely on Stolpe et al [2019]'s work, this section briefly summarizes their approach and what a language implementer needs to do to benefit from it.…”

Section: A Language-agnostic Design Of Amentioning

confidence: 99%

“…While not mentioned in Stolpe et al [2019], providing code lenses for such scenarios should be trivial, since it already relies on unit tests to harvest information for the IDE.…”

Section: Informational Featuresmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This section reviews the language server protocol, discuss alternative approaches such as language workbenches, and summarizes the work by Stolpe et al [2019].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 3 more Smart Citations