With its history of 10 years passionate software engineering, dozens of contributors and millions of lines of source code, Xtext has become the de facto standard for the development of sophisticated domain specific languages in the Eclipse ecosystem and beyond. The release of Xtext 2.14 is still hot and yet Xtext 2.15 is already keeping us busy. Time to reflect on the recently introduced features and time to look forward and talk about the things to come.
One of the biggest challenges for Xtext is the deep integration with a large number of other frameworks and libraries like the Eclipse Platform, LSP, EMF, JDT, Guava, ASM, Gradle, Tycho, Maven and of course Java itself. Even though this is crucial to the success of Xtext, it also has implications for the architecture. Especially the shorter release cadence of Java and the Eclipse platform, this is getting increasingly more interesting. In this talk, we will use the opportunity and provide insights on our plans how to tackle and keep on rolling. We will also demo the new features for Xtext and Xtend and talk about the support for the new Eclipse capabilities like Code Mining or the Minimap. It’s exciting as ever to be an Xtext user!