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IMP: The IDE Meta-Tooling Platform

Building a state-of-the-art Eclipse IDE for a new programming language is a difficult undertaking. Although much of this work is inevitable and requires an in-depth understanding of the language structure and semantics, a significant portion embodies common themes and code structures, and requires extensive knowledge of Eclipse API's, which represent a great opportunity for code and knowledge reuse in the form of a meta-tooling framework for IDE development.

IMP is an ongoing project, begun at IBM Watson Research, to develop such meta-tooling for Eclipse. The goal of the project is to ease the development of commercial-quality IDE support for new programming languages, including the following features:

• generation and management of parsers, AST's, and semantic analysis
• syntax highlighting, outline view population, package explorer-like navigation, content assistance, project natures and builders, error markers
• refactoring support (not only "Move" and "Rename", but type- and code-related refactorings requiring non-trivial analysis, e.g. "Extract Method" and "Infer Type Arguments")
• static program analysis (pointer analysis, type analysis, etc.) in support of the above
• execution and debugging support

We accomplish this by a mixture of language service-creation wizards, class libraries to encapsulate common language-processing infrastructure, and code skeletons to get the language service-implementer started. Moreover, the IMP framework has been engineered to support the incremental specification and implementation of language services for languages that derive from an existing base language, as for example our X10 concurrent programming language does from Java. In this way, IDE's built using IMP are themselves extensible.

IMP has been driven in part from the need to produce full-featured IDE's for several language research activities at IBM Research, including:

• the X10 language, a Java-derived language for highly concurrent programs
• the XJ language, which integrates XML access, literal documents and schema types into Java
• the LPG grammar specification language

IMP is also in part self-hosting: we are using IMP to create and support DSLs (domain-specific languages) for various aspects of IDE development, for example:

• the PrefSpecs language and IDE for specifying information about preferences and preference pages in IMP IDEs
• the Box language and IDE for specifying information about text formatting in IMP IDEs

IMP also supports the use of LPG for the definition of languages for which IDEs are to be built.

The LPG, PrefSpecs, and Box IDEs are included in the IMP release; the X10 IDE is available (with other X10 software) from http://x10.sourceforge.net/x10home.shtml.

IMP News

IMP is now fully available through Eclipse.org. That includes

• The IMP update site: http://download.eclipse.org/technology/imp/updates/ (see also the IMP installation instructions)
• The IMP source repository: https://dev.eclipse.org/svnroot/technology/org.eclipse.imp
  As you can see, this is an SVN repository, which is supported in Eclipse through the Subclipse plug-in, which you can obtain at http://subclipse.tigris.org
• The IMP Bugzilla database, which has been imported into the Eclipse Bugzilla https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/
• The IMP newsgroup news://eclipse.technology.imp, and developer's mailing list https://dev.eclipse.org/mailman/listinfo/imp-dev

The latest IMP release is targeted to work with Eclipse versions 3.2, 3.3, and 3.4 up to M5. Please let us know if you have any problems, especially with the later versions of Eclipse.