Xtext: implement your language faster than the quick and dirty way

Whether there is an (emerging or legacy) Domain-Specific Language to increase the expressiveness of your coworkers or whether you are about to invent a new General Purpose Prgramming Language: Tool support that goes beyond a parser/compiler is essential to make other people adopt your language and to be more productive. Xtext is an award- winning framework to build such tooling.

In this tutorial we explain how to define a language and a statically typed, EMF-based Abstract Syntax Tree using only a grammar. We then generate a parser, a serializer and a smart editor from it. The editor provides many features out-of-the-box, such as syntax highlighting, content-assist, folding, jump-to-declaration and reverse-reference lookup across multiple files. Then, it is shown how literally every as- pects of the language and its complementary tool support can be customized using Dependency Injection, especially how this can be done for linking, formatting and validation. As an outlook, we will demonstrate how to integrate a custom language with Java, how Xtext maintains a workspace-wide index of named elements and how to implement incremental code generation or attach an interpreter.