Portable Editor Services

Portable Editor Services Master’s Thesis Daniël Pelsmaeker Portable Editor Services THESIS submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of MASTER OF SCIENCE in COMPUTER SCIENCE by Daniël Pelsmaeker born in Enschede, the Netherlands Programming Languages Group Department of Software Technology Faculty EEMCS, Delft University of Technology Delft, the Netherlands www.ewi.tudelft.nl © 2018 D.A.A. Pelsmaeker. Cover picture: Hailstone sequence of the Collatz conjecture, shown for positive integers up to 28 steps from 1, laid out in a circle around 8. Portable Editor Services Author: Daniël Pelsmaeker Student id: 1367838 Email: [email protected] Abstract Implementing the syntax and semantics of a new (domain-specific) programming language is a lot of work, which is worsened by the additional work needed to add support for the language to an editor such as Eclipse or VS Code. Lack of such support can impede language usability and adoption, as developers prefer different editors. How- ever, supporting m editors for n languages requires m ˆ n implementations to be built and maintained, which is known as the IDE portability problem. Portable editor services aim to reduce this to m + n implementations, which leads to the main question of this thesis: how can we make the editor services of languages portable across editors? Language definitions made in the Spoofax language workbench can automatically expose their editor services in any editor that Spoofax supports. Therefore, we evaluate the portability of Spoofax Core, the editor-agnostic core of Spoofax, through an implementation of the workbench in the IntelliJ editor, and discuss the challenges we faced. To get portability for editor services of languages in general, we first investigate how editor services can be added to the most popular editors, and explore their features, documentation, and application programming interfaces. From this, we derive a platform- agnostic model for portable editor services: AESI, the Adaptable Editor Services Interface. AESI describes the maximum set of common editor service features supported by the editors we investigated, while at the same time imposing minimal requirements upon any implementation of these editor services. We evaluate AESI by providing two language implementations, and adapting AESI to Eclipse, IntelliJ, and VS Code. Finally, we compare AESI with other solutions to the IDE portability problem, such as Language Server Protocol and Monto. Thesis Committee: Chair: Prof. dr. E. Visser, Faculty EEMCS, TU Delft Committee Member: Dr. S.T. Erdweg, Faculty EEMCS, TU Delft Committee Member: Dr. ir. A.R. Bidarra, Faculty EEMCS, TU Delft University Supervisor: Ir. G.D.P. Konat, Faculty EEMCS, TU Delft Preface I would like to thank my supervisors Gabriël Konat and Eelco Visser for the opportunity to work on this project, and their time, patience, insights, and helpful feedback. I have learned a lot about doing research in general, and the field of programming language research in par- ticular, and will apply this knowledge throughout the rest of my career. I am also grateful to Danny Groenewegen and Sven Keidel for their help, and to the members of the Program- ming Languages group for the interesting discussions, and the motivating and productive working environment. Last but not least, a big thanks to my family for their support during my time as a student. Daniël Pelsmaeker Delft, the Netherlands April 25, 2018 iii Contents Preface iii Contents v List of Figures vii List of Tables xi 1 Introduction 1 2 Porting Spoofax Core to IntelliJ 5 2.1 Challenges and Observations ............................ 5 2.2 Conclusion ....................................... 13 3 Editor Plugins 15 3.1 IntelliJ Language Plugin ............................... 15 3.2 Xtext Language Plugin ................................ 17 4 Comparing Editor Services 19 4.1 Syntax Coloring .................................... 20 4.2 Code Completion ................................... 29 4.3 Structure Outline ................................... 37 4.4 Reference Resolution ................................. 41 4.5 Code Actions ..................................... 45 4.6 Debugging ....................................... 49 4.7 Miscellaneous Editor Services ............................ 57 4.8 Conclusion ....................................... 59 5 Adaptable Editor Services Interface 61 5.1 Requirements ..................................... 61 5.2 Design ......................................... 62 5.3 Syntax Coloring .................................... 72 5.4 Code Completion ................................... 73 5.5 Structure Outline ................................... 74 5.6 Reference Resolution ................................. 75 5.7 Code Actions ..................................... 75 5.8 Debugging ....................................... 76 5.9 Evaluation ....................................... 77 v Contents 6 Related work 85 6.1 General Portability .................................. 85 6.2 Portability using Language Workbenches ..................... 85 6.3 Portability using Language Server Protocol .................... 86 6.4 Portability using Monto ............................... 86 7 Conclusion 89 7.1 Future Work ...................................... 90 Bibliography 91 Acronyms 97 A Comparing Editor Services 99 A.1 Code Folding ..................................... 100 A.2 Hover Documentation ................................ 104 A.3 Signature Help .................................... 108 A.4 Automatic Formatting ................................ 112 A.5 Rename Refactoring .................................. 116 A.6 Diagnostic Messages ................................. 120 A.7 Testing ......................................... 125 B Adaptable Editor Services Interface 129 B.1 Code Folding ..................................... 129 B.2 Hover Documentation ................................ 129 B.3 Signature Help .................................... 129 B.4 Automatic Formatting ................................ 131 B.5 Rename Refactoring .................................. 131 B.6 Diagnostic Messages ................................. 132 B.7 Testing ......................................... 133 C PAPLJ Grammars 135 C.1 SDF3 Grammar .................................... 135 C.2 TextMate Grammar .................................. 140 C.3 IntelliJ Grammars ................................... 145 C.4 Xtext Grammar .................................... 150 C.5 ANTLR Grammars .................................. 154 D Snippet Syntax 157 vi List of Figures 1.1 The IDE portability problem and its solution in AESI ................ 2 2.1 Incomplete syntax coloring in Spoofax for IntelliJ ................... 9 2.2 Spoofax project configuration example in YAML ................... 10 2.3 New Spoofax Project wizard in IntelliJ ......................... 12 2.4 Test runner in IntelliJ ................................... 13 4.2 Light and dark syntax theme in VS Code ........................ 21 4.3 PAPLJ TextMate grammar excerpt ........................... 23 4.4 The Visual Studio syntax coloring API ......................... 24 4.5 The Eclipse syntax coloring API ............................. 26 4.6 The IntelliJ syntax coloring API ............................. 27 4.7 The Notepad++ syntax coloring API .......................... 28 4.9 Smart code completion in IntelliJ ............................ 29 4.10 The Visual Studio code completion API ........................ 30 4.11 The Eclipse code completion API ............................ 31 4.12 The IntelliJ code completion API ............................ 32 4.13 The LSP code completion API .............................. 33 4.14 The Sublime code completion API ........................... 33 4.15 The Atom Autocomplete+ code completion API ................... 34 4.16 The Vim code completion API .............................. 34 4.17 The Cloud9 code completion API ............................ 35 4.18 The Eclipse Che code completion API ......................... 35 4.20 Structure outline in Eclipse ............................... 37 4.21 The Eclipse structure outline API ............................ 38 4.22 The IntelliJ structure outline API ............................ 39 4.23 The Cloud9 structure outline API ............................ 40 4.25 Reference resolution in Visual Studio .......................... 41 4.26 The IntelliJ reference resolution API .......................... 42 4.27 The VS Code reference resolution API ......................... 43 4.28 The Cloud9 reference resolution API .......................... 44 4.30 Code actions in Visual Studio .............................. 45 4.31 The Visual Studio code actions API ........................... 46 4.32 The Eclipse code actions API .............................. 46 4.33 The IntelliJ code actions API ............................... 46 4.34 The VS Code code actions API .............................. 47 4.35 The Cloud9 code actions API .............................. 47 4.36 The LSP code actions API ................................ 48 vii List of Figures 4.38 Debugging in Visual Studio ............................... 49 4.39 Main Visual Studio debugging API structures ..................... 51 4.40 The Eclipse debugging API ............................... 52 4.41 The IntelliJ debugging API ................................ 53 4.42 The VS Code debugging API .............................. 54 4.43 The Cloud9 debugging API ............................... 56

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