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bnr | 5 years ago

Building a DSL on top of JetBrains MPS will give you most, if not all of that. You can distribute an IntelliJ plugin or even a standalone IDE.

https://www.jetbrains.com/mps/

discuss

notacoward|5 years ago

Thanks, that looks interesting. AFAICT it only covers the editor/IDE parts, though, and that's not even close to "most" of what I mentioned. How does it help create linters and checkers? How does it ease integration with debuggers and build systems? Plus, you have to use JetBrains to get even that. Nothing against JetBrains, but that's not going to help at most companies which have already settled on other tools. It looks like a slightly easier way to create the core part of a DSL, but I'm not sure that solves the problem of the result being an "alien" thing that other developers will develop distaste for.

bnr|5 years ago

It uses a projectional editor, so there is only one way of "formatting" the code and no need for a linter. The typesystem is very powerful and allows a language engineer to create arbitrary checks on the language which are executed inside the IDE.

I have not tried building a debugger for a DSL in MPS, but it might be achievable, at least if you're targeting Java as a generated language.

Build integration is available for Maven and Gradle.