I'm looking for an editor/IDE that can provide features that are nice to have while coding (example: being able to click-through to function definitions) for languages that it is not specifically built for. By these, I have in mind languages designed for a very specific purpose and often only used by a small community. In other words, ones that would not have native support in most software.
I realize this would require a fair bit of fairy dust but I don't think it's out of the scope of what's possible. Basically, the editor would have to be smart enough to recognize the commonly used syntax and semantics that many declarative languages have in common. It's quite possible this would require some amount of configuration.
Does something like this exist? If not, what challenges do you think there would be in creating it?
If you need only the feature to jump of to the definition of a specific function or class, then VIM (and many other editors, like Emacs, Epsilon and JOE) can read the jump location from the ctags file. You just have to write a ctags file generator for your custom language.
For programmable editors (like VIM, Emacs, Epsilon, Eclipse and gedit), you can write your own plugin for your custom language, but it may quickly become time-consuming and a maintenance nightmare, because new versions of editors tend to change the plugin interface.
Please note that adding support for syntax highlighting is usually much easier than adding ctags-like support for symbol lookups. More advanced features, like refactoring and context-sensitive symbol completion (like Ctrl-Space and Tab in modern IDEs) are even harder to implement.
GNU Emacs has a pretty good infrastructure for this sort of thing. Until recently Haskell was a relatively unknown language used primarily by researchers. Nevertheless, in a few thousand lines of Emacs Lisp, we have
Syntax highlighting with colors
Automatic indentation
Package support
Automatic highlighting of type and other information when placing the cursor over library functions
Meta-dot on an identifier to jump to its definition (through the standard emacs tags mechanism)
The nice thing about Emacs is that (a) there are many models to follow, and (b) you can build up the environment gradually, starting with those aspects that are most important to you.
I'm suprised no one has mentioned Notepad++ yet:
http://notepad-plus-plus.org/
It offers syntax support for a great many languages and offers the user to add new languages, and an active community that adds many languages that are not included out-of-the-box.
Most good IDE's are language agnostic and supports several if not many programming languages. If you are talking about DSL's, eclipse has a solution that seems pretty awsome - Xtext
EditPadPro comes with a set of tools that allow you to build your own syntax highlighting, code folding and file navigation schemes, based on a very powerful regex syntax. So if your language is not among the many that have already been provided out-of-the-box or can be downloaded off the website, you can roll your own quite easily (and share it with the community).
Visual Studio is designed to allow for this, but it requires the language to add explicit support. For example, Delphi Prism will install into Visual Studio, and provide full language support.
This is far above and beyond "configuration", however, and requires quite a bit of custom development to support.
SciTE and Scintilla offer a generic editor/platform for different languages. The library contains several parsers that work with many programming languages and you can reuse one of these for your own language to add formatting and syntax highlighting.
They don't offer advanced features like click-throughs, but you could build it on top of the library.
Visual Studio and Eclipse also support language plug-ins.
Zeus is a language neutral IDE for the Windows platform and it provides this go to definition/declaration functionality for any language supported by ctags.
To make it work you just create a Zeus project/workspace and then add the files to this workspace.
Related
It's been more than an year that i'm developing a new scripting language with its own grammar rules and constructs.
I'd like to give the users of this language some minimalistic ide to work with, but i don't want/have time to make one from scratch so i'd like to take one already existing (it has to run on Linux platforms natively, so no windows-only editors plz) and customize it.
Well, which one is the easiest to customize without changing the source code and recompiling it, maybe even with plugin support?
Thank you.
UPDATE
I don't need to know which editor is the best for you, i need to know which one is the easiest to customize AND, most of it, which one has the most complete documentation about new language customization.
Ex: SciTE is good, but its documentation about custom grammars is really poor.
Have you looked into Scintilla/SciTE? I think it gets used often for this sort of thing. It's very lightweight, but from what I understand, is easy to add functionality to. It's not really an IDE, but it's more of a text-editor component that you could use as the basis for a simple IDE. I've used SciTE, which is a sort of demo text editor of Scintilla's capabilities. It's simple, but also quite fast and responsive.
I suppose another option would be to write plugins for existing IDEs such as Eclipse or Netbeans. Both of these IDEs support many languages just through 3rd-party plugins. Going this route means you don't need to build a complete UI, just the components needed to make your language work.
The downside of building plugins for an extendable IDE (such as NetBeans or Eclipse) is that you are at the mercy of the IDE developers. If they change the way the platform works, you must ensure that your plugins still work with the new versions. Sometimes this can become a major problem.
All of these options should work on Linux as well as Windows.
This sounds like a very ambitious project and I wish you luck.
I don't use linux too often, I use a Mac and my favorite text editor is called TextMate because it has snippets, code completion, and a whole mess of other features. The closest thing to it that I've found on linux is called Scribes.
There's always Emacs or Vim (I lean towards Vim, but that's just my opinion :) ). Neither are IDEs per se, but both are very extensible and it shouldn't be too hard to create settings for each that will aid people writing scripts in your language.
I'm working on a project that requires me to create a series of editors for languages that are quite different. The syntaxes are defined by us.
I'm looking for a solution for this.
Is there a shortcut to take in this problem?
You could use XText:
a framework for development of textual domain specific languages (DSLs).
Just describe your very own DSL using Xtext's simple EBNF grammar language and the generator will create a parser, an AST-meta model (implemented in EMF) as well as a full-featured Eclipse text editor from that.
Alternatives to XText are Rascal or Spoofax, both less popular than XText but interesting for they support more general context-free grammars, among other things. Nice to check out.
If you are looking for a more low level, programmable solution, then Eclipse's IDE Meta-tooling platform is a good choice (IMP).
What IMP gives you is API to connect your existing parsers to Eclipse without much hassle. You need to implement an IParseController interface, to call your parser and ITokenIterator to produce tokens and some other interface to assign fonts to each kind of token.
The aforementioned Rascal and Spoofax are both build on top of IMP.
Not mentioned is DLTK (proposed also in Tutorial regarding the development of a custom Eclipse editor)
There are Ruby, bash that are implemented with it.
As already discussed in "Lua as a general-purpose scripting language?" Lua currently probably isn't the best scripting language for the desktop environment.
But what do you think about the future? Will Lua get so popular that there will soon be enough libraries to be able to use it like Python, Ruby or something similar?
Or will it simply stay in it's WoW niche and that's it?
I think it has a great future, a lot of projects are starting to adopt it for it's simplicity and usefulness.
Example: Awesome WM (Window Manager)
The project recently released version 3, incorporating a new configuration system completely written in Lua. Allowing you to literally write your configuration file as a program, loops, booleans, data structures.
Personally I love the syntax and the flexibility of such a system, I think it has great potential.
I wouldn't be surprised if it became more popular in the future.
Brian G
I suppose the answer starts with 'It depends how you want to use it...'.
If you're writing the common business app (fetch the data from the database, display the data in a web page or window, save the data to the database), Lua already has what you need.
The Kepler Project contains goodies for web development. Check out their modules to see some of the available libraries - there's network, MVC, DBMS access, XML, zip, WSAPI, docs...
As an example web app, check out Sputnik.
For desktop UI, there's wxLua - Lua hooks for wxWidgets.
ORM is conspicuously missing but that didn't stop people from developing in other languages before ORM was available.
If you're looking for specialized libraries - scientific, multimedia , security - don't count Lua out before you check LuaForge.
When it comes down to it, there's nothing in Lua's design that prevents general purpose use. It just happens to be small, fast, and easy to embed... so people do.
Uh? I would say instead WoW is a niche in the Lua ecosystem... The world of Lua doesn't revolve around WoW, there are lot of applications, some big like Adobe Lightroom (to take a non game), using Lua.
Lua is initially a scripting language, in the initial sense, ie. made to be embedded in an application to script it. But it is also designed as an extensible language, so we will see progressively more and more bindings of various libraries for various purposes.
But you will never get an official big distribution with batteries included, like Python or Perl, because it is just not the philosophy of the authors.
Which doesn't prevent other people to make distributions including lot of features out of the box (for Windows, particularly, where it is difficult to build the softwares).
Lot of people already use it for general system-level scripting, desktop applications, and such anyway.
There are more and more libraries for Lua.
If you are a Windows user, have look at Lua for Windows. It comes with "batteries included" (wxLua, LuaCURL, LuaUnit, getopt, LuaXML, LPeg...).
Very usefull!
It's 2017, 9 years after this question was first asked, and lua is now being heavily used in the field of machine learning due to the Torch library.
I really like it as an embedded language. It's small, very easy to use and embed and mostly does what I need right out of the box. It's also similar enough to most languages that it has never really been an issue for me. I also like how easy it is to redefine and add base functions and keywords to the language to suit whatever needs my application has.
I have used it in the WoW area but I've also found it useful as a generic scripting language for a number of different applications I've worked on, including as a type of database trigger. I like Ruby and Python and other more full-featured scripting languages but they're not nearly as convenient for embedding in small applications to give users more options for customizing their environments.
being comfortable as a shell language has nothing to do with being a great general purpose language.
i, for one, don't use it embedded in other applications; i write my applications in Lua, and anything 'extra' is a special-purpose library, either in Lua or in C.
Also, being 'popular' isn't so important. in the Lua-users list periodically someone appears that says "Lua won't be popular unless it does X!", and the usual answer is either: "great!, write it!", or "already discussed and rejected".
I think the great feature of Lua is, that it is very easily extensible. It is very easy to add the Lua interpreter to a program of your own (e.g. one written in C, C++ or Obj-C) and with just a few lines of code, you can give Lua access to any system resource you can think of. E.g. Lua offers no function to do xxx. Write one and make it available to Lua. But it's also possible the other way round. Write your own Lua extension in a language of your choice (one that is compilable), compile it into a native library, load the library within Lua and you can use the function.
That said, Lua might not be the best choice as a standalone crossplatform language. But Lua is a great language to add scripting support to your application in a crossplatform manner (if your app is crossplatform, the better!). I think Lua will have a future and I think you can expect that this language will constantly gain popularity in the long run.
Warhammer Online, and World of Warcraft use it for their addon language I believe.
I think it's hot! I'm just no good at it!
Well, greetings from 2022.
It is already a general purpose language. Today you can even serve pages using OpenResty, extend games, read databases or create scripts as shellscript replacements.
There are a plenty of libraries "modules" for Lua, many ways to achieve what you are wanting and Lua 5.4 is even faster.
The "extendable and extensive" nature of Lua, accostumed people to think it should only be used as plugin or extension. In Linux, by example, you can shebang a file with lua-any, make it executable and run like any system script. Or you can make a folder app like Python or virtualenv using Lupe. Lua 5.3 also gained impressive performance improvements.
Also there are many good tools like IUP to create native windows in Lua for Mac, BSD, Linux and Windows and side environments like Terra that lets you use Lua with its counterpart Terra and write compiled programs. Lua now, is more than a extension language, it has its own universe.
I do mostly Java and C/C++ development, but I'm starting to do more web development (PHP, Rails) and Eiffel (learning a new language is always good).
Currently, I use Eclipse for Java, C/C++, and Ruby (not Rails). Since I know the environment, I'm thinking that it would be easier for me to find a plugin and use Eclipse for all of my development languages. But are there cases where a language-specific IDE (EiffelStudio for Eiffel, as an example) would be better than Eclipse?
I have used many many IDE's and in most cases to me it breaks down to personal preferences. Sometimes the language specific ones have some addins/addons/features that are nice but unless they are things you can not live without you should go with what is most comfortable for you.
I would think that if you are comfortable with the multi-language IDE it would be better to stick with that one. This way you dont have to memorize multiple IDE layouts, keyboard shortcuts etc.
Mastering an IDE takes time and energy. Using a multi-language IDE is definitively beneficial for a programmer who needs to develop in several languages. It is for the same reason that tools like VI and Emacs are so popular.
On the other side, IDE specialized in one language could sometimes go much further on some aspect and could be the preferred choice in some situations.
I love Eclipse as Java IDE (so much that we decided to build some Eclipse based application) and I'm an Emacs fan. But I also like the Groovy support of IntelliJ and the efficiency of EiffelStudio.
It's a matter of taste, you forgive the ones you love...
It entirely depends on the user and the language itself, if you are comfortable with the keyboard shortcuts then you can consider the plugin else you can go for a IDE . However most of the IDE comes with a cross-functional key maps so you use the key maps which u are more comfortable with....
I've been making my way through The Little Schemer and I was wondering what environment, IDE or interpreter would be best to use in order to test any of the Scheme code I jot down for myself.
Racket (formerly Dr Scheme) has a nice editor, several different Scheme dialects, an attempt at visual debugging, lots of libraries, and can run on most platforms. It even has some modes specifically geared around learning the language.
I would highly recommend both Chicken and Gauche for scheme.
PLT Scheme (DrScheme) is one of the best IDEs out there, especially for Scheme. The package you get when downloading it contains all you need for developing Scheme code - libraries, documentation, examples, and so on. Highly recommended.
If you just want to test your scheme code, I would recommend PLT Scheme. It offers a very complete environment, with debugger, help, etc., and works on most platforms.
But if you also want to get an idea of how the interpreter behind the scenes works, and have Visual Studio, I would recommend Tachy. It is a very lightweight scheme interpreter written in c#. It allows you to debug just your scheme code, or also step through the c# interpreter behind the scenes to see what is going on.
Just for the record I have to mention IronScheme.
IronScheme will aim to be a R6RS conforming Scheme implementation based on the Microsoft DLR.
Version 1.0 Beta 1 was just released. I think this should be good implementation for someone that is already using .NET framework.
EDIT
Current version is 1.0 RC 1 from Oct 23 2009
Google for the book's authors (Daniel Friedman and Matthias Felleisen). See whether either of them is involved with a popular, free, existing Scheme implementation.
It doesn't matter, as long as you subscribe to the mailing list(wiki/irc/online-community-site) for the associated community. It's probably worth taking a look at the list description and archives to be sure you are in the right one.
Most of these are friendly and welcoming to newcomers, so don't be afraid to ask.
It's also worth searching the archives of their mailing list(or FAQ or whatever they use) when you have a question - just in case it is a frequent question.
Good Luck!
Guile running under Geiser within Emacs provides a nice, lightweight implementation for doing the exercises. Racket will also run under Geiser and Emacs, though I personally prefer Guile and Chez Scheme a bit more.
Obviously installation of each will depend on your OS. I would recommend using Emacs version 24 and later since this allows you to use Melpa or Marmalade to install Geiser and other Emacs extensions.
The current version of Geiser also works quite nicely with Chicken Scheme, Chez Scheme, MIT Scheme and Chibi Scheme.
LispMe works on a Palm Pilot, take it anywhere, and scheme on the go. GREAT way to learn scheme.
I've used PLT as mentioned in some of the other posts and it works quite nicely. One that I have read about but have not used is Allegro Common LISP Express. I read a stellar review about their database app called Allegro Cache and found that they are heavy into LISP. Like I said, I don't know if it's any good, but it might be worth a try.
I am currently working through the Little Schemer as well and use Emacs as my environment, along Quack, which adds additional support and utilities for scheme-mode within Emacs.
If you are planning on experimenting with other Lisps (e.g. Common Lisp), Emacs has excellent support for those dialects as well (Emacs itself can be customized with its own dialect of Lisp, appropriately named Emacs Lisp).
As far as Scheme implementations go, I am currently using Petit Chez Scheme, which is an interpreted, freely distributable version of Chez Scheme (which uses a compiler and costs money to obtain a license).