Table of Contents
Xtend 2.19.0 Release Notes Sep 3, 2019
Xtend 2.19.0 is mainly a maintenance release.
Fixes
- The
DelegateActive Annotation now uses a stable order. - Improved
@Overrideannotations in generated code. - Improved ambigous constructor calls.
Upgrades
Xtend now uses Guava 27.1.0. The new version will be picked up automatically if you make use of the Xtext BOM or consume Xtend from its P2 repository.
Infrastructure
Xtend is built now on the new Kubernetes based CBI infrastructure JIRO.
Credits
The Xtend Language project is thankful for the dedication of each committer and contributor. This release has been made possible by the following persons (in order of the number of contributed commits to this release):
- Christian Dietrich (itemis)
- Karsten Thoms (itemis)
- Nico Prediger (itemis)
- Sebastian Zarnekow (itemis)
- Tamas Miklossy (itemis)
Fixed Issues
As in every release cycle we were eagerly hunting down bugs, and reviewed and integrated plenty of contributions. 5 issues and 62 pull requests have made it into this release. For further details please refer to the following lists:
Xtend 2.18.0 Release Notes Jun 4, 2019
Xtend 2.18.0 provides new language features (Ternary Expressions and Try-With-Resources) and some smaller improvements.
Ternary Expressions
Xtend now allows to use the ternary operator. This enables to assign conditional values to variables in the shortest possible way, as already well known from Java.
val v = condition ? “thenValue” : “elseValue”
If it is disapproved to use ternary expressions, it is possible to flag them with an error and convert them via quickfix into a traditional if-expression.
val v = if(condition) “thenValue” else “elseValue”
Try With Resources
Try statements are often used with resources, that have to be closed in the finally block. Xtend now supports the convenient try-with-resources expression. This closes the opened resources automatically at the end of the try block - without having to code that explicitly.
def m() {
val resource = new StringReader("This \n is a text!");
try
return resource.read
finally
resource?.close
}
Becomes:
def m() {
try (val resource = new StringReader("This \n is a text!"))
return resource.read
}
Eclipse Integration
New Quickfix: Rename Class
When an Xtend class name does not match the file name it is defined in then Xtend raises a warning. A new quickfix has been provided to rename the class according to the file name. (#744)
Quickfix “Remove Unused Member” Improved
The quickfix “Remove member” for unused members was improved. Additionally to the member itself the quickfix will now also remove obsolete import statements and write accesses. (xtext-xtend)
Xtend Elements Wizards in Project Explorer / Navigator View
Context menu entries to trigger New Wizards for Xtend elements were only offered in the Package Explorer. These entries are now additionally offered in the context menu in the Project Explorer and Navigator views. (xtext-xtend#699)
Maven Integration
When the goal xtend-install-debug-info is executed on empty source directories, a warning is raised by default:
[WARNING] Directory <SOURCE_DIR> is empty. Can't process.
This warning can now be suppressed by configure the new parameter showEmptyDirWarning to false. (xtext#787)
Xtend Compiler
The Xtend batch compiler lookup order preferred classes in jars on the classpath before local classes that are on the source path. The order has been changed so that local classes are now first on the search path. (#750)
Credits
The Xtend Language project is thankful for the dedication of each committer and contributor. This release has been made possible by the following persons (in order of the number of contributed commits to this release):
- Christian Dietrich (itemis)
- Karsten Thoms (itemis)
- Sebastian Zarnekow (itemis)
- Arne Deutsch (itemis)
- Holger Schill (itemis)
- Eva Poell (itemis)
- Lorenzo Addazi
- Niko Stotz (Altran)
- Max Leuthäuser (itemis)
- Vivien Jovet
Fixed Issues
As in every release cycle we were eagerly hunting down bugs, and reviewed and integrated plenty of contributions. More than 20 issues and almost 60 pull requests have made it into this release. For further details please refer to the following lists:
Xtend 2.17.1 Release Notes Apr 3, 2019
This is a hotfix release. Here is the list of fixed issues:
- There was a bug in the Xtext Builder that leads to non Xtext projects being built by Xtext.
- The LSP4J version in Xtext 2.17.0 did not match the one in Eclipse 2019-03. Upgraded to LSP4J 0.7.0.
- The Xtend Batch Compiler preferred classes found on the classpath over local classes.
Xtend 2.17.0 Release Notes Mar 5, 2019
This release focuses on the compatibility with Java 11 & Eclipse 2019-03, stability, performance and technical debt reduction.
Java 11
Xtend is now fully compliant with Java 11. Java 11 can be chosen as runtime VM and as target version for the compiler.
xtend-maven-plugin
BOM Managed Dependencies
One major pain point with past releases was that the xtend-maven-plugin used ranged dependencies. This lead sometimes to problems with the plugin execution, which had to be worked around by clients by explicit dependency management.
Solving this problem was one of the main motivations behind the introduction of the new Maven BOM. With this BOM all external dependencies of Xtext and its Maven plugins are managed in compatible versions without room for interpretation of dependency version ranges.
Upgrade to Maven 3 API
The xtext-maven-plugin has been refactored to use the latest Maven 3 API. The most significant internal change is that all doclet based configurations have been changed to use Maven 3 annotation API.
Faster Startup
The plugin was using version ranges for some of its dependencies, especially Google Guava. Resolving the metadata of these ranged dependencies lead to a short time delay on execution of the plugin. All used dependency versions have been pinned to a single version, which speeds up the plugin execution.
Resolve Usage of Deprecated API
The plugin has been refactored to resolve all usages of deprecated API from Eclipse Platform and m2e bundles. (to issue)
Quickfixes
Quickfix for ‘unused private member’
The unused private member issue can now be resolved by a quickfix. The quickfix is capable to resolve multiple selected issues at once when selected from the Problems view. (details)
Quickfix to Add the Abstract Modifier
If a class is named something like ‘AbstractFoo’ but is not declared abstract. A warning is raised and can be resolved via quickfix insertion of the abstract modifier. (details)
Static Member Favorites
Annoyed by typing org.junit.Assert.assertEquals to use static methods? Wouldn’t it be cool having all your favorite static methods at hand and let the language do the import automatically? In JDT this feature is known as Static Member Favorites and it comes with a preference page, where you can configure which class’s methods should be visible. Besides wildcard imports you could make a single method visible - it’s up to you.
We thought it’s a good idea to reuse the already defined JDT preferences in Xtend. Since this release Xtend supports Static Member Favorites like Java does - but a bit more.
In Xtend we have extension methods. Here the first parameter becomes the implicit receiver. The visible static methods are analysed to fit as an extension method and then gets imported like that.
Deprecations
Deprecation of Android Archetype
The Maven archetype org.eclipse.xtend.maven.android.archetype has been deprecated with this version and is no longer published.
Deprecation of GWT related artifacts
The bundles org.eclipse.xtend.lib.gwt and org.eclipse.xtext.xbase.lib.gwt are now deprecated. They are subject for removal in one of the next releases.
Credits
The Xtend Language project is thankful for the dedication of each committer and contributor. This release has been made possible by the following persons (in order of the number of contributed commits to this release):
- Christian Dietrich (itemis)
- Karsten Thoms (itemis)
- Holger Schill (itemis)
- Tamas Miklossy (itemis)
- Sebastian Zarnekow (itemis)
- Arne Deutsch (itemis)
- Prajwal Gowda (itemis)
- Eva Poell (itemis)
- Stéphane Galland
Fixed Issues
As in every release cycle we were eagerly hunting down bugs, and reviewed and integrated plenty of contributions. More than 18 issues and almost 50 pull requests have made it into this release. For further details please refer to the following lists:
Xtend 2.16.0 Release Notes Dec 4, 2018
This release focuses on stability, performance and the compatibility with Eclipse 2018-12.
Hover and Hyperlink on links in Javadoc comments
Inside Xtend source files, hovering over a link inside a Javadoc will now display the Javadoc comments in a hover pop-up. F3 is also supported on these links.
Triple-equals quickfix is now a multifix
Warnings of the type The operator '!=' should be replaced by '!==' when null is one of the arguments. could only be fixed one by one. The quickfix has been extended to allow fixing multiple issues at once.
Deprecation of GWT
We will no longer maintain the GWT versions of Xbase and Xtend Lib. The corresponding jars will be no longer published with future versions of Xtext (likely from 2.17 on).
Outlook for 2.17
Java 11 Support, a Maven BOM and a new MWE version are planned for 2.17.
Fixed Issues
As in every release cycle we were eagerly hunting down bugs, and reviewed and integrated plenty of contributions. More than 90 issues and almost 300 pull requests have made it into this release. For further details please refer to the following lists:
Xtend 2.15.0 Release Notes Sep 4, 2018
This release focuses on stability, performance and the integration in Eclipse 2018-09.
Minimal Required Target Platform
Xtext and Xtend 2.15 are built and tested against Eclipse Oxygen.3a and newer. Thus we recommend to use at least Eclipse Oxygen.3a or even better Eclipse 2018-09. For older versions of the Eclipse Platform we cannot guarantee backwards compatibility even though we carefully assess any changes that are made.
Smarter Organize Imports
In the past there were a couple of corner cases where organize imports did not yield the optimal result. It could even lead to broken code under certain conditions. We fixed these scenarios and organize imports now works nicely, even when multicatch or static extensions are involved.
Improved Performance of the Gradle Build
The Gradle build performance was greatly improved. Tasks that consumed lots of memory and even more CPU cycles could be fixed such that it’s now way faster to build Xtend with Gradle.
2.14:
2.15:
Fixed QuickFixes
In some cases, quick fixes broke existing code, this no longer happens.
Improved JUnit Support
Test methods must return void to be valid test cases. This is now statically checked by the Xtend validation.
New API IterableExtensions.reject(Class)
An overloaded variant of reject() was added for convience, this allows type based rejection of elements from an iterable.
Fixed Issues
As in every release cycle we were eagerly hunting down bugs, and reviewed and integrated plenty of contributions. More than a 100 issues and almost 300 pull requests have made it into this release. For further details please refer to the following lists:
Xtend 2.14.0 Release Notes May 23, 2018
Java 9 and 10 Support
Xtext and Xtend 2.14 are able to compile with and against Java 10. Here are a few notes on the Support
- There is no native support for Java 9/10 module visibilities but we fall back to jdt/javac on that topic.
Compiler
Avoid generation of unnecessary exception variables
When an exception variable is not used within a catch block, the transpiled Java code contained an unused variable.
Considering the following Xtend snippet:
try {
... some code ...
} catch (SomeException e) {
// do nothing with "e"
}
The catch block was transpiled to:
catch (final Throwable _t) {
if (_t instanceof SomeException) {
final SomeException e = (SomeException)_t;
} else {
throw Exceptions.sneakyThrow(_t);
}
}
Xtend will now avoid the generation of the variable when it is not used within the catch block:
catch (final Throwable _t) {
if (_t instanceof SomeException) {
} else {
throw Exceptions.sneakyThrow(_t);
}
}
Multi-Catch Support
With Xtend 2.14 the exception handling supports multi-catch clauses.
The multi-catch clause can handle an arbitrary number of exceptions separated by “|”.
Within the catch block, the intersection exception type of the exceptions caught by the multi-catch statement is available for further processing.
Multi-catch support leads to semantically rich and more concise catch statements.
Multi-Type Guard Support
The type guard feature in switch statements is enhanced by support for testing multiple types in one case statement.
As for the multi-catch statements the different types handled by a single case statement are separated by “|”.
The intersection type of the types specified in the multi-type guard statement is available within the case block.
Unnecessary Modifiers Validation
Xtend detects unnecessary modifiers in code, e.g. the public modifier on types. By default issues of this kind are raised as warnings, the severity level is configurable.
For convenient resolution of these issues a quick fix has been added.
Eclipse Integration
Organize Imports
The Organize Imports feature has been improved to consider inner types properly.
Links
Fixed Issues
As in every release we are eagerly hunting down the bugs, review and integrate lots of contributions. 88 issues, 62 Pull Requests and 20 Bugzilla tickets have made it into this release. For further details please refer to the following lists:
Xtext 2.13.0 Release Notes Oct 20, 2017
Xtend 2.13 is out
Xtend 2.13 is mainly a bugfix release.
Fixed Issues
As in every release we are eagerly hunting down the bugs, review and integrate lots of contributions. 88 issues, 62 Pull Requests and 60 Bugzilla tickets have made it into this release. For further details please refer to the following lists:
Xtend 2.11.0 Release Notes Feb 1, 2017
Xtend version 2.11 comes with a new source repository and plenty of improvements and bug fixes.
New Source Repository
The Xtend code base has been moved to a dedicated repository xtext-xtend in the course of the restructuring of Xtext (see the Xtext 2.11.0 Release Notes).
The Xtend Language and Library
String Concatenation Performance Improvements
The performance of string concatenation, e.g. as used for rich strings, has been improved. This change has important consequences for working with Xtend: you should make sure that you use consistent versions of Xtend in your host IDE and your target platform in order to avoid compatibility problems.
Improved Compiler
The Java code produced by the Xtend compiler is now less verbose and more readable. For many situations Xtend does not produce synthetic variables anymore.
For switch statements on Strings an additional null guard is produced. This lead to NPEs when a null argument was passed to the switch statement.
A for-loop over an array resulted in uncompilable Java code. This has been fixed.
Comparison with null
For comparison expressions with null as argument it is more efficient to use the triple (not) equals operator === and !== instead of == and !=. While the “normal” operators will result in a call of Objects.equal, the triple equals operator can perform a direct comparison.
For these situations a warning is produced and a quickfix is offered.
New Class Wizard
The New Xtend Class wizard has an option to create a main method.
Xtend 2.9.0 Release Notes Dec 1, 2015
Version 2.9 adds support for IntelliJ and includes many bug fixes. (full bugzilla list).
IntelliJ IDEA support
There is now an Xtend plug-in for IntelliJ IDEA. The plug-in provides a smart code editor for Xtend files, including syntax highlighting, code completion, on-the-fly validation, automatic compilation in the background, and more. The plug-in uses the same parser and compiler as Eclipse, but we had to re-implement large parts of the UI integration code.
Create a new Xtend type (class, interface, or enum) inside Java packages.
Enjoy the smart code editor with syntax highlighting and code completion. The latter also proposes Xtend’s extension methods. The example from this screenshot is a small JUnit test, which - obviously - can also be launched as such.
Android Studio Support
Xtend now supports Android Studio, which uses IntelliJ IDEA as a foundation. This is not to be confused with the Android Developer Tools, which are based on Eclipse and which have been supported by Xtend since the very beginning.
This is exciting news as it allows you to use lambda expressions and Active Annotations for Android development - something neither Android Studio nor ADT support out of the box.