Language and IDE Modularization and Composition with MPS

Modularization and composition of languages and their IDEs is an important building block for working efficiently with domain-specific languages. Traditionally this has been a challenge because many grammar formalisms are not closed under composition, hence syntactic composition of languages can be challenging. Composing semantics can also be hard, at least in the general case. Finally, a lot of existing work does not consider IDEs for the composed languages. This paper illustrates how JetBrains MPS addresses language and IDE modularization and composition based on a projectional editor and modular type systems and transformations. The paper also classifies composition approaches according to the dependencies between the composed languages and whether syntactic composition is supported. Each of the approaches is illustrated with an extensive example implementation in MPS.

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