Language Design with the Spoofax Language Workbench

Abstract

IDEs are essential for programming language developers, and state-of-the-art IDE support is mandatory for programming languages to be successful. Although IDE features for mainstream programming languages are typically implemented manually, this often isn't feasible for programming languages that must be developed with significantly fewer resources. The Spoofax language workbench is a platform for developing textual programming languages with state-of-the-art IDE support. Spoofax is a comprehensive environment that integrates syntax definition, name binding, type analysis, program transformation, code generation, and declarative specification of IDE components. It also provides high-level languages for each of these aspects. These languages are highly declarative, abstracting over the implementation of IDE features and letting engineers focus on language design.