ASF+SDF Meta-Environment 2.0.1 released

We have released The ASF+SDF Meta-Environment 2.0.1!

The 2.x release has been coming for a while. The release candidates RC1, RC2 and RC3 have been used in several local projects and in courses for the Master Software Engineering at the UvA. After some bug fixing we are now happy to announce version 2.0.1.

Please download bundled source distributions or binary installers for linux here.

The ASF+SDF Meta-Environment 2.0.1. is a programming language workbench, featuring advanced syntax definition and term rewriting functionality, as well as IDE and visualization features. Among other applications, it is used to implement Domain Specific Languages, Software Analyses and Source-to-source Transformations.

The 2.x release has many features, which we will not list here. Please refer to the extensive documentation.

This is a high-level overview:

• Integrated support for syntax definition in SDF, including
  • modular syntax definitions (any context-free grammar) in SDF
  • an SDF static checker
  • automatic parser generation
  • generated syntax editors with configurable syntax highlighting
  • parse tree and parse forest visualizations
• Integrated support for source analysis and transformation in ASF+SDF, including
  • ASF+SDF, featuring conditional term rewriting with concrete syntax for source code patterns, syntax safe transformation and generation of source code and automated tree traversal.
  • ASF editors, with syntax highlighting.
  • ASF static checker
  • ASF interpreter, featuring 'hifi' source-to-source transformation (i.e. no loss of source code comments)
  • ASF compiler, extremely fast compiled term rewriting systems
  • Automatic IDE integration for language support programmed in ASF+SDF:
    • Syntax highlighting
    • Static checkers
    • Reverse engineering and software visualization
    • SVG drawing
  • Integrated ASF step-wise debugger.

For users of the 1.5.x series of The Meta-Environment, these are the major differences:

• The Meta-Environment integrates editors in tabbed windows, instead of interfacing with Emacs or ViM
• ASF+SDF now features fully structured lexical constructor functions, and is therefore now completely "syntax safe".
• The ASF static checker detects more errors and generates warnings for common programming errors
• There is a lot of online documentation now!

What the future holds?

Development and maintenance on the 2.x series will continue for a while. In parallel, the Meta-Environment team is working on the following:

• "Rascal" - a domain specific language for integrated software analysis and transformation
• Facilitating source code fact extraction using "DeFacto"
• Contributing to Eclipse IMP, a platform for IDE construction
• Port of The Meta-Environment to Eclipse IMP
• SDF ambiguity diagnostics