Model-to-text generation has been an early goal of the modeling approach, in order to leverage models for generating source code, configuration files, documentation, etc. In the EMF ecosystem, Acceleo provides this capacity as a template-based language that has been part of the Eclipse release train since 2009.
As a consequence of its maturity, Acceleo has been under maintenance in the last few years, meaning it has also been very stable.
However, latest user feedbacks have made clear that significant changes in the core of Acceleo were necessary to drastically improve the runtime performance and user experience when writing Acceleo templates. This prompted us to rewrite most parts of the language, including its syntax, runtime and toolings such as editor and debugger.
This talk will first introduce the template-based approach of Acceleo to EMF model-to-text generation. Then we will show how the changes in the latest Acceleo version benefit end users, thanks to: Acceleo Query Language (AQL) providing a modern type system (incl. type inference and union types), a faster runtime, a Language Server Protocol (LSP)-based editor and a Debug Adapter Protocol (DAP)-based debugger.