Section: New Software and Platforms

IDE Meta-tooling Platform

Participants : Jurgen Vinju [correspondent] , Michael Steindorfer.

IMP, the IDE meta tooling platform is an Eclipse plugin developed mainly by the team of Robert M. Fuhrer at IBM TJ Watson Research institute. It is both an abstract layer for Eclipse, allowing rapid development of Eclipse based IDEs for programming languages, and a collection of meta programming tools for generating source code analysis and transformation tools.

Characterization:

A5, SO-3, SM4-up5, EM-4, SDL-5, DA-2-CD-2-MS-2-TPM-2

WWW:

https://github.com/impulse-org/

Objective:

The IDE Meta Tooling Platform (IMP) provides a high-level abstraction over the Eclipse API such that programmers can extend Eclipse with new programming languages or domain specific languages in a few simple steps. IMP also provides a number of standard meta tools such as a parser generator and a domain specific language for formal specifications of configuration parameters.

Users:

Designers and implementers of IDEs for programming languages and domain specific languages. Also, designers and implementers of meta programming tools.

Impact:

IMP is a popular among meta programmers especially for it provides the right level of abstraction.

Competition:

IMP competes with other Eclipse plugins for meta programming (such as Model Driven Engineering tools), but its API is more general and more flexible. IMP is a programmers framework rather than a set of generators.

Engineering:

IMP is a long-lived project of many contributors, which is managed as an Eclipse incubation project at eclipse.org . Currently we are moving the project to Github to explore more different ways of collaboration.

Publications:

[2] [29]

• Significant performance improvements to the IMP program database. Performance is now better than equivalent data structure libraries in Scala and Clojure.