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Language-Independent Development Environment Support for Dynamic Runtimes Language-Independent Development Environment Support for Dynamic Runtimes Daniel Stolpe Tim Felgentreff Christian Humer Hasso Plattner Institute Oracle Labs Oracle Labs University of Potsdam Potsdam, Germany Zurich, Switzerland Potsdam, Germany [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] potsdam.de Fabio Niephaus Robert Hirschfeld Hasso Plattner Institute Hasso Plattner Institute University of Potsdam University of Potsdam Potsdam, Germany Potsdam, Germany [email protected] [email protected] Abstract CCS Concepts • Software and its engineering → In- There are many factors for the success of a new programming tegrated and visual development environments; Soft- language implementation. Existing language implementa- ware maintenance tools. tion frameworks such as Truffle or RPython have focused Keywords Language Server Protocol, Truffle, Graal on run-time performance and security, or on providing a ACM Reference Format: comprehensive set of libraries. Daniel Stolpe, Tim Felgentreff, Christian Humer, Fabio Niephaus, The tools that language users need to be productive are and Robert Hirschfeld. 2019. Language-Independent Development also an important factor for the adoption of a programming Environment Support for Dynamic Runtimes. In Proceedings of language. The aforementioned frameworks, however, pro- the 15th ACM SIGPLAN International Symposium on Dynamic Lan- vide limited support for creating comprehensive develop- guages (DLS ’19), October 20, 2019, Athens, Greece. ACM, New York, ment tools. This is an impediment to language adoption that NY, USA, 11 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3359619.3359746 can be as serious as performance issues or lack of libraries. Both Truffle and RPython already provide run-time tools 1 Introduction such as for debugging, profiling, or coverage in a language- As use-cases evolve, so do programming languages to deal independent manner, but neither support static development with the rising complexity of modern software systems. De- tasks carried out in code editors. veloping a new programming language from scratch is a In this work, we propose a language-agnostic approach challenging task. Traditionally, ensuring the performance of to add this missing tooling by making the Language Server new implementations is competitive with existing ones has Protocol available automatically to all language implemen- consumed a large amount of development time. Frameworks tations on the Truffle framework. Furthermore, we show such as RPython [1] and Truffle [21] address this and provide how our approach can utilize runtime information to pro- good performance with reasonable effort on the part of the vide IDE features rarely available for dynamic programming language developer. languages. However, another barrier for new and evolving languages has been tool support. Users often have to give up on existing tools and learn new ones, if there even are replacements Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for for all the tools they used before. The Truffle and RPython personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies frameworks have recognized this and thus provide hooks are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for language implementations to gain support for interactive for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must debugging, profiling, and coverage information easily. be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or One tool that is still missing is a code editor with a rich republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific set of capabilities. The Language Server Protocol (LSP) tack- permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]. les this tooling aspect by connecting multiple Development DLS ’19, October 20, 2019, Athens, Greece Environments (DEs) with a language server. This server is © 2019 Copyright held by the owner/author(s). Publication rights licensed to ACM. implemented per language, but the burden of building or ACM ISBN 978-1-4503-6996-1/19/10...$15.00 integrating with existing environments is handled by the https://doi.org/10.1145/3359619.3359746 protocol. DLS ’19, October 20, 2019, Athens, Greece Daniel Stolpe, Tim Felgentreff, Christian Humer, Fabio Niephaus, and Robert Hirschfeld In this work, we propose an approach to provide assisted 2.1 Tools in Language Implementation Frameworks code editing for new language implementations in a frame- In this work we are interested in performance-focused work like Truffle with the same ease as it provides perfor- language implementation frameworks like Truffle [21] or mance. Language implementers merely have to use the hooks RPython [1]. In these frameworks, tooling has been a fo- provided by the framework in order to get an integration cus only where it did not compete with performance. Thus, with any LSP client for free, and receive at least basic syn- languages developed in these frameworks have fewer tools tax error reports, completion of globals and locals, as well available when compared to language workbenches like references, definition, and meta-information lookups. Our Spoofax [7], Xtext [3], or MPS [20], which are used to create language-agnostic approach is not meant to replace estab- Domain Specific Languages (DSLs) and their corresponding lished language servers for a specific language, but provide a DEs. good baseline for languages for which no such server exists Truffle [21] is a language implementation framework writ- yet. ten in Java. The language developer uses the framework Code assistance for dynamic language code is especially to write an Abstract Syntax Tree (AST) interpreter, which challenging and our approach includes suggestions on how the framework optimizes during interpretation. How source to collect and utilize runtime information to improve editing code is parsed and the AST is structured is the responsi- features for dynamic languages. For programming languages bility of the language implementation. Truffle has built-in with typed symbols, like Java, the required information can support for developing language-agnostic tools by providing be derived from the source code, but for dynamically typed an instrumentation API [16] using meta-information that languages, DEs typically try to infer types and/or make use language implementations attach to their AST nodes. This of additional type hints in source code comments or other API has been used already to provide all Truffle languages annotations. Good type inference engines are difficult to with code coverage, CPU and memory profiling tools, as well build and require language-specific knowledge. Many dy- as debugging with the Chrome debugger. (The debugger pro- namic languages also include constructs that prevent type tocol is also supported by VSCode, IntelliJ, and Netbeans.) inference such as eval. PyPy [13] is an alternative implementation of the Python As proof of concept, we have implemented Graal-lsp, a language [17] written in RPython, a restricted subset of polyglot language server implementation for the GraalVM. Python. The language developer is free to structure the in- Thus, our contributions in this work are: terpreter as they see fit, although bytecode interpreters are the most common approach for RPython-based languages. • An approach to build a language-agnostic language RPython provides no generic API for tools like Truffle does. server on top of performance-focused language imple- However, the RPython library includes a CPU profiler1 and mentation frameworks. a reverse debugger2. Languages can make use of these with • An approach to provide IDE-like features for dynamic minimal effort by registering entry points with Python deco- languages, by collecting and utilizing runtime infor- rators and by implementing callbacks to attach for the tools mation. to call into. • An implementation of these approaches using the Truf- fle framework, which includes polyglot code comple- 2.2 Code Editors and the Language Server Protocol tion and goto-definition features. A huge number of code editors exist and the choice of editor is an amusingly frequent source of arguments amongst de- The rest of this paper is structured as follows: in section 2, velopers. The LSP3 is an approach to standardize language we provide background information pertaining to the LSP support for development tools to make the choice of editor and language implementation frameworks. In section 3 we less tied to the choice of language. The LSP defines a server describe our approach to build a language-agnostic language and a client. The server needs to be implemented only once server on top of Truffle and what the language developer for every language, providing the language-specific develop- has to do in order to support the different features. Finally, ment features. Any editor that can act as a language client in section 4 we discuss related work and we conclude and can make use of any language server and therefore are able summarize future work in section 5. to support multiple languages with minimal effort. For a number of languages (including R, Python, Ruby, 2 Context and JavaScript), multiple LSP server implementations already In this section we give a brief overview over the two areas we 1 combine in this work: a) Truffle and RPython as instances of https://morepypy.blogspot.com/2016/08/pypy-tooling-upgrade-
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