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SugarJ

Library-based Language Extensibility

SugarJ Eclipse plugin

News

Description

In essence, the goal of SugarJ is to enable expressing programms in the syntax most natural to the problem domain the program is supposed to address. For instance, when generating XML documents in Java, the programmer should be able to use standard XML syntax instead of Java syntax for calling JDOM, say.

We propose to integrate syntactic extensibility into the main extension mechanism of programming languages—libraries. Libraries thus export syntactic sugar in addition to semantic artifacts traditionally exported: classes, methods, data types, etc. When importing a library, the syntax of the general purpose language is augmented by the syntactic definition exported by the library.

SugarJ in action

Notably, libraries that contain syntactic sugar retain the composability and self-applicability of conventional libraries: syntactic sugar can be composed by importing multiple libraries; syntactic sugar can be used in the development of a library that exports syntactic sugar itself. This enables the embedding of DSLs and the development of meta-DSLs, that is a DSL for defining DSLs, without ever leaving or reasoning outside of a SugarJ program.

Installation and Usage

Please ensure enough stack space (about 4-16 MB) is available for the SDF parser. You can set the stack space of your Java runtime using the -Xss16m command line argument when starting Eclipse or setting -Xss16m in your eclipse.ini file.

For a quick start, install our Eclipse plugin available at http://update.sugarj.org/. The update dialog will let you select any number of our currently supported host languages: Java (*.sugj), Haskell (*.shs), Prolog (*.sugp).

The source code of all components of SugarJ is available on github.
case studies, compiler, IDE, language libraries.

We also prepared some information on first steps with SugarJ.

Subprojects

We are currently developing a number of extensions of SugarJ. The relevant code can be found as follows:

Team

Get in touch, discuss, or simply stay up-to-date by joining the SugarJ Google group.

Publications

Sebastian Erdweg, Felix Rieger, Tillmann Rendel, and Klaus Ostermann. Layout-sensitive Language Extensibility with SugarHaskell. In Proceedings of Haskell Symposium, 2012. to appear. [ abstract | .pdf ]

Sebastian Erdweg, Paolo G. Giarrusso, and Tillmann Rendel. Language Composition Untangled. In Proceedings of Workshop on Language Descriptions, Tools and Applications (LDTA), 2012. to appear. [ abstract | .pdf ]

Sebastian Erdweg and Lennart C. L. Kats and Tillmann Rendel and Christian Kästner and Klaus Ostermann and Eelco Visser. Growing a Language Environment with Editor Libraries. In Proceedings of Conference on Generative Programming and Component Engineering (GPCE), pages 167–176. ACM, 2011. [ abstract | .pdf ]

Sebastian Erdweg, Tillmann Rendel, Christian Kästner and Klaus Ostermann. SugarJ: Library-based Syntactic Language Extensibility. In Proceedings of Conference on Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages, and Applications (OOPSLA), pages 391–406. ACM, 2011. Distinguished Paper Award. [ abstract | .pdf ]