Because many people rightly complained it was impossible to create source level debugger for their languages, Sun tried to answer by JSR 45, "Debugging Support for Other Languages". So far, only language/debugger that takes advantage of this feature is JSP.
Somehow I don't think JSR 45 alone will help language designers much. Writing a compiler is a hard job. Does javac have enough hooks to help compiler writers? Even if javac provides enough hooks, who'd use it when there is jikes? Javac is too painfully slow.
How about jikes? Jikes Parser Generator looks impressive but its only documentation is its authors PhD thesis.
Maybe GCC (ie GCJ frontend) + GDB is the way out for the language designers? Alas, this option cannot work outside linuxland.
Next important piece nobody mentions is doclet. If your language runs on JVM (to take advantage of existing Java class library and their Javadoc documentation), it should also produce Javadoc. However it doesn't make much sense to produce Javadoc when your language isn't Java, does it? Because few non-Java languages take advantage of Javadoc, most of doclets are about output formats eg Framemaker, SGML, PDF, etc, not content and semantics. Maybe it would be an interesting exercise to start designing languages with documentation in mind.
Once there are a decent compiler, a debugger and a documentation system, then an IDE could be built. Obvious candidates are Eclipse and Netbeans.
(originally posted on 2002-12-26 on blog page, slightly edited on 2003-01-23)
Copyright 2003 Jay Han
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