imp.runtime

IMP radically simplifies and speeds up the IDE development process in Eclipse, for both language with existing front-ends as well as languages generated using compiler and interpreter generation frameworks.

The IMP run.time is essentially a wrapper for Eclipse RCP and some JDT API that let's you focus on your language features as opposed to UI features. The core of the run-time is the UniversalEditor class which is a language parametric editor. By instantiating the UniversalEditor, using extension points, with information about your own language you can incrementally create a basic IDE. You provide this information mainly by implementing a number of simple interfaces.

IMP is described in a 2009 OOPSLA paper

There are currently no active maintainers of this project. An active fork with semantic versioning, is maintained at https://github.com/usethesource/impulse.

Update site

You will find a temporary update site for IMP here. It is actually quite stable:

• http://update.rascal-mpl.org/unstable
• http://update.rascal-mpl.org/stable will have a version before the end of september 2014

IMP is used mostly as an internal component to a number of succesful language workbenches. If you are authoring one and wish to know about IMP stability and deployment, please contact us.

Extension points

The first and only absolutely necessary extension point to bind is "languageDescription". It makes your language known to Eclipse and triggers a special editor whenever a file with a particular extension is opened:

<extension point="org.eclipse.imp.runtime.languageDescription">
      <language description="Hello" extensions=".ext" language="MyLanguage">
      </language>
   </extension>

The second most important extension point is "parserWrapper":

 <extension id="rascal_eclipse.parserWrapper" name="My Language parser" point="org.eclipse.imp.runtime.parser">
      <parser class="org.mylanguage.MyParseController" language="MyLanguage">
      </parser>
   </extension>

This will force you to implement IParseController, a simple interface which allows you to call your own parser and return any kind of parse tree, abstract syntax tree or list of tokens. The point of IParseController is to be agnostic in what parsing technology you use or what kind of representation you have for the output of the parser. Hence the parse method in IParseController returns an object of type java.lang.Object. Downstream this same object will be passed to you again, for example when you want to add some syntax highlighting.

For now, my time is up describing imp.runtime, but you may have gotten the gist of this now :-) Simply search for "imp" in the editor of plugin.xml to discover more of the extension points of UniversalEditor. It includes features for outline, highlighting, menu options, etc.

IMP is not perfect, but it gives you a head start in developing an IDE without too much fuss, and it does not assume much about the way you want to deal with your own language, except of course that you have a JVM :-)