Language Design with the Spoofax Language Workbench

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.