Table of Contents

Xtext 2.32.0 Release Notes  Aug 27, 2023


Xtext 2.32.0 is a maintenance release.

Call to Action: Secure the future maintenance of Xtext

As you might have recognized, the number of people contributing to Xtext on a regular basis has declined over the past years and so has the number of contributions. At the same time the amount of work for basic maintenance has stayed the same or even increased with the new release cadence of Java and the Eclipse simultaneous release. Briefly: The future maintenance of Xtext is at risk, at least in the current form and as part of the Eclipse Simrel. If you care, please join the discussion in https://github.com/eclipse/xtext/issues/1721.

Upgrades

  • Guava was update to 32.1.2
  • Guice is now on 7.0.0 javax.inject annotations are no longer suported. Use the ones from guice or jakarta.inject.
  • MWE was updated to 2.15.0
  • Gradle is on 8.2
  • xtext-web now uses jakarta.servlet api

For removal reminder

  • Please remember the old xpand based org.eclipse.xtext.generator as well as the Xpand/Xtend(1) based metamodel postprocessor are deprecated and marked for removal.

Credits

The Xtext 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
  • Shashwat Anand (Advantest)
  • Ruben Porras (Avaloq)
  • Florian Pirchner
  • Jan Rosczak (Hapag-Lloyd)
  • Joao Ferreira (Avaloq)
  • Lorenzo Bettini (Università degli Studi di Firenze)
  • Sebastian Zarnekow

Fixed Issues

As in every release cycle we were eagerly hunting down bugs, and reviewed and integrated plenty of contributions. For further details please refer to the following lists:

Xtext 2.31.0 Release Notes  May 29, 2023


Xtext 2.31.0 is a maintenance release.

Call to Action: Secure the future maintenance of Xtext

As you might have recognized, the number of people contributing to Xtext on a regular basis has declined over the past years and so has the number of contributions. At the same time the amount of work for basic maintenance has stayed the same or even increased with the new release cadence of Java and the Eclipse simultaneous release. Briefly: The future maintenance of Xtext is at risk, at least in the current form and as part of the Eclipse Simrel. If you care, please join the discussion in https://github.com/eclipse/xtext/issues/1721.

Xtext Monorepo

Xtext is now built from the new Monorepo at https://github.com/eclipse/xtext and built with Maven only. Many thanks to Lorenzo Bettini for the great effort to make this possible.

Upgrades

  • LSP4J is now on 0.21.0
  • ASM is now on 5.9
  • Junit5 was updated to 5.9.3

Changes / Enhancements

  • Xtext hovers now support disposing browsers on timeout (see https://github.com/eclipse/xtext/issues/2653 and linked platform and jdt issues and pr there)
  • Our DebugSourceInstallingCompilationParticipant now makes use of JDTs feature to do the bytecode manipulation without extra reading and writing the file.

Credits

The Xtext 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.

  • Lorenzo Bettini (Università degli Studi di Firenze)
  • Christian Dietrich (itemis)
  • Hannes Wellmann (IILS mbH)
  • Christian Schneider (TypeFox)
  • Ed Merks
  • Sebastian Zarnekow (independent)

Fixed Issues

As in every release cycle we were eagerly hunting down bugs, and reviewed and integrated plenty of contributions. For further details please refer to the following lists:

Xtext 2.30.0 Release Notes  Feb 27, 2023


Xtext 2.30.0 is a maintenance release.

Call to Action: Secure the future maintenance of Xtext

As you might have recognized, the number of people contributing to Xtext on a regular basis has declined over the past years and so has the number of contributions. At the same time the amount of work for basic maintenance has stayed the same or even increased with the new release cadence of Java and the Eclipse simultaneous release. Briefly: The future maintenance of Xtext is at risk, at least in the current form and as part of the Eclipse Simrel. If you care, please join the discussion in https://github.com/eclipse/xtext/issues/1721.

Upgrades

  • EMF is now at 2.29 and later.
  • Jetty 9.4.50
  • We pinned the versions in manifests to match the ones in the minimal target platform for Eclipse 2022-03.
  • Reload4j/log4j is now at 1.2.24
  • LSP4J was updated to 0.20.0 and GSON to 2.10.1

Changes / Enhancements

The minimal version for Eclipse Platform and JDT in manifests were bumped so that they correspond to our minimal tested target platform of Eclipse 2022-03.
The performance of (overloaded) Xbase expressions was enhanced.

Deprecation

We marked Deprecated API more explicit and also added some forRemoval to them.

Credits

The Xtext 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 to all repositories except xtext-xtend):

Christian Dietrich (itemis)
Lorenzo Bettini (Università degli Studi di Firenze)
Sebastian Zarnekow (independent)
Elie Richa (AdaCore)

Fixed Issues

As in every release cycle we were eagerly hunting down bugs, and reviewed and integrated plenty of contributions. For further details please refer to the following lists:

Xtext 2.29.0 Release Notes  Nov 21, 2022


Xtext 2.29.0 is a maintenance release.

Call to Action: Secure the future maintenance of Xtext

As you might have recognized, the number of people contributing to Xtext on a regular basis has declined over the past years and so has the number of contributions. At the same time the amount of work for basic maintenance has stayed the same or even increased with the new release cadence of Java and the Eclipse simultaneous release. Briefly: The future maintenance of Xtext is at risk, at least in the current form and as part of the Eclipse Simrel. If you care, please join the discussion in https://github.com/eclipse/xtext/issues/1721.

Xtext and Java 17

Xtext now supports Java 17 as source and target, too. This requires newer Eclipse platform and JDT versions that do no longer run on Java 8. That’s why the Xtext framework and Xtend compiler require Java 11 as minimal Java version from 2.29 onwards. While we were at it we also bumped the minimal tested Eclipse version to 2022-03 (2.28 was still compatible to and tested against Eclipse Oxygen). Please Note: We did no special treatment for newer Java constructs in Xtend, so what works, works, what does not, does not - the latter being most likely intentional. Please engage by filing bugs or pull requests (see also issue#1982.

Upgrades

  • LSP4J was updated to 0.19.0
  • GSON to 2.9.1
  • Classgraph is now at 4.8.149
  • ASM is now on 9.4
  • MWE(2) is now at 1.8.0 / 2.14.0
  • JUnit5 at 5.9.1

Changes / Enhancements

Standalone Builder

The Incremental Standlone Builder is now capable of performing incremental builds. Depending on the changes that happened since the previous compile run, only a subset of the model files need to be processed. Both model and Java file changes as well as class-path changes are taken into account. The feature is opt-in since it might break backwards compatibility for DSLs that use non-default code generation patterns. Incremental builds can also be enabled for the Xtext maven plugin xtext-extras#805.

<plugins>
    <plugin>
        <groupId>org.eclipse.xtext</groupId>
        <artifactId>xtext-maven-plugin</artifactId>
        <configuration>
            <languages>
                <language>
                    <javaSupport>(true|false)</javaSupport>
                    <setup>..MyDslStandaloneSetup</setup>
                </language>
            </languages>
            <incrementalXtextBuild>true</incrementalXtextBuild>
        </configuration>
        <dependencies>
            <dependency>
                ..
            </dependency>
        </dependencies>
    </plugin>
</plugins>

LSP

Language server now has a beta version of semantic token support.

Credits

The Xtext 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 to all repositories except xtext-xtend):

  • Christian Dietrich (itemis)
  • Sebastian Zarnekow (independent)
  • Ruben Porras
  • Lorenzo Bettini (Università degli Studi di Firenze)

Fixed Issues

As in every release cycle we were eagerly hunting down bugs, and reviewed and integrated plenty of contributions. For further details please refer to the following lists:

Xtext 2.28.0 Release Notes  Aug 29, 2022


Xtext 2.28.0 is a maintenance release.

Call to Action: Secure the future maintenance of Xtext

As you might have recognized, the number of people contributing to Xtext on a regular basis has declined over the past years and so has the number of contributions. At the same time the amount of work for basic maintenance has stayed the same or even increased with the new release cadence of Java and the Eclipse simultaneous release. Briefly: The future maintenance of Xtext is at risk, at least in the current form and as part of the Eclipse Simrel. If you care, please join the discussion in https://github.com/eclipse/xtext/issues/1721.

Changes to org.eclipse.xtext.sdk feature.

The org.eclipse.xtext.sdk does no longer package the deprecated org.eclipse.xtext.generator bundle. Please migrate to the new workflow/generator. The old and deprecated generator can still be found in the new org.eclipse.xtext.generator feature.

Upgrades

  • LSP4J was updated to 0.15.0
  • GSON was updated to 2.9.0

Changes / Enhancements

  • LSP Code was optimized and enhanced. We have e.g. done some enhancements to Quickfix API.
  • Xtext Supports M2E 2.x
  • Xbase based formatters now can be subclassed in Java more easily.
  • Better support for needRebuild api in platform.

Credits

The Xtext 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 to all repositories except xtext-xtend):

Christian Dietrich (itemis)
Ruben Porras
Karsten Thoms (karakun)
Frank Benoit (ETAS)
Hannes Wellmann (IILS mbH)

Fixed Issues

As in every release cycle we were eagerly hunting down bugs, and reviewed and integrated plenty of contributions. For further details please refer to the following lists:

Xtext 2.27.0 Release Notes  May 30, 2022


Xtext 2.27.0 is a maintenance release.

Call to Action: Secure the future maintenance of Xtext

As you might have recognized, the number of people contributing to Xtext on a regular basis has declined over the past years and so has the number of contributions. At the same time the amount of work for basic maintenance has stayed the same or even increased with the new release cadence of Java and the Eclipse simultaneous release. Briefly: The future maintenance of Xtext is at risk, at least in the current form and as part of the Eclipse Simrel. If you care, please join the discussion in https://github.com/eclipse/xtext/issues/1721.

Changes to org.eclipse.xtext.sdk feature.

The org.eclipse.xtext.sdk does no longer package the deprecated org.eclipse.xtext.generator bundle. Please migrate to the new workflow/generator. The old and deprecated generator can still be found in the new org.eclipse.xtext.generator feature.

Upgrades

  • Tycho 2.7.3
  • Xtext now uses Reload4j 1.2.19
  • Gradle 7.4.2 / xtext-gradle-plugin 3.0.2
  • ASM 9.3
  • MWE(2) to 1.7.0 / 2.13.0
  • LSP4j is now on version 0.14.0 / protocol version 3.17.0

Changes

  • The qualifiers of org.antlr.runtime,javax.xml,org.aopalliance have changed due to (breaking) changes in orbit.

Enhancements

  • Xtext makes now use of the enhanced possibilities for requesting rebuilds in platform. Please test this in your environments and give feedback
  • The experimental API for Quickfix code actions of the Xtext Language Server Protocol (LSP) implementation has been extended to support textual quickfixes. This comes in addition to the existing support for semantic quickfixes

Removals

  • Xtext no longer depends on commons lang

Credits

The Xtext 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 to all repositories except xtext-xtend):

  • Christian Dietrich (itemis)
  • Lorenzo Bettini (Università degli Studi di Firenze)
  • Ruben Porras
  • Sebastian Zarnekow (independent)
  • Lukas Foerner
  • Titouan Vervack (Sigasi)

Fixed Issues

As in every release cycle we were eagerly hunting down bugs, and reviewed and integrated plenty of contributions. For further details please refer to the following lists:

Xtext 2.26.0 Release Notes  Feb 28, 2022


Xtext 2.26.0 is a maintenance release.

Call to Action: Secure the future maintenance of Xtext

As you might have recognized, the number of people contributing to Xtext on a regular basis has declined over the past years and so has the number of contributions. At the same time the amount of work for basic maintenance has stayed the same or even increased with the new release cadence of Java and the Eclipse simultaneous release. Briefly: The future maintenance of Xtext is at risk, at least in the current form and as part of the Eclipse Simrel. If you care, please join the discussion in https://github.com/eclipse/xtext/issues/1721.

Xtext and Java 17

Xtext now supports running on Java 17 with Java 8 and 11 targets. Source and Target 17 are not supported yet and are planned for Xtext 2.27.0. This will also require dropping Java 8 in the next release.

Upgrades

  • Tycho was updated to 2.6.0
  • GSON was updated to 2.8.9
  • LSP4J was updated to 0.12.0 / protocol version 3.16.0
  • Xtext now uses Guice 5.0.1 and thus the warnings on Java 11+ should be gone.
  • ASM was updated to 9.2
  • Gradle (in Wizard) is now updated to 7.x and the xtext-gradle-plugin to 3.0.1
  • Classgraph is updated to 4.8.137

Enhancements

  • The Xtext LSP implementation has learned folding support.
  • xtext-maven#139 : xtext-maven can now install trace information for DSLs with a derived Java model (for example languages using Xbase).
  • Dependencies to Log4j are now less restrictive so that you should be able to use reload4j as drop-in replacement.

Deprecations

  • The already deprecated MergeableManifest classes we marked “for removal”. Make sure you do not longer use them.
  • We will drop support for GWT in a future release.
  • The next Xtext version will likely no long support Java versions below Java 11.

Credits

The Xtext 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 to all repositories except xtext-xtend):

Christian Dietrich (itemis)
Karsten Thoms (Karakun)
Sebastian Zarnekow (independent)
Ruben Porras
Dennis Hübner (TypeFox)
Stefan Oehme (independent)
Titouan Vervack (Sigasi)
Edmundo Lopez
Mark Sujew (TypeFox)
Michael Keppler (ETAS)
Tamas Miklossy (itemis)
Nico Prediger (itemis)
Heinrich Weichert (AVL DiTEST)
Lawrence Goossens (Sigasi)
Oliver Libutzki (independent)

Fixed Issues

As in every release cycle we were eagerly hunting down bugs, and reviewed and integrated plenty of contributions. For further details please refer to the following lists:

Xtext 2.25.0 Release Notes  Mar 2, 2021


Xtext 2.25.0 is a maintenance release.

Call to Action: Secure the future maintenance of Xtext

As you might have recognized, the number of people contributing to Xtext on a regular basis has declined over the past years and so has the number of contributions. At the same time the amount of work for basic maintenance has stayed the same or even increased with the new release cadence of Java and the Eclipse simultaneous release. Briefly: The future maintenance of Xtext is at risk, at least in the current form and as part of the Eclipse Simrel. If you care, please join the discussion in https://github.com/eclipse/xtext/issues/1721.

Documentation

The LSP Support section has been added to the Xtext documentation.

Upgrades

  • MWE(2) was updated to 2.12.1/1.6.1.
  • Xtext now uses Guava 30.1, ASM 9.1 and GSON 2.8.6.

Bugfixes

  • xtext-core#1648: A regression in JUnit 5 API was fixed. It should work well again.
  • xtext-core#1655: The ANTLR option k in the workflow works now as expected.
  • XbaseInterpreter now correctly handles the return; statement.

Enhancements

  • The Formatter2 is now flagged as API.
  • The Java API for Formatter2 learned a new, more fancy syntax. e.g. instead of it -> it.noSpace() you now can write this::noSpace.
  • The TemplateNewFileWizard and NewFileWizardPrimaryPage API is opened up to allow for easier customization.

Credits

The Xtext 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 to all repositories except xtext-xtend):

  • Christian Dietrich (itemis)
  • Arne Deutsch (itemis)
  • Tamas Miklossy (itemis)
  • Karsten Thoms (Karakun)
  • Nico Prediger (itemis)
  • Sebastian Zarnekow (independent)
  • Mark Sujew (TypeFox)
  • Harald Fassler
  • Andreas Heiduk
  • Lorenzo Addazi (Mälardalen University Sweden)

Fixed Issues

As in every release cycle we were eagerly hunting down bugs, and reviewed and integrated plenty of contributions. For further details please refer to the following lists:

Xtext 2.24.0 Release Notes  Dec 1, 2020


Xtext 2.24.0 is a maintenance release.

Call to Action: Secure the future maintenance of Xtext

As you might have recognized, the number of people contributing to Xtext on a regular basis has declined over the past years and so has the number of contributions. At the same time the amount of work for basic maintenance has stayed the same or even increased with the new release cadence of Java and the Eclipse simultaneous release. Briefly: The future maintenance of Xtext is at risk. If you care, please join the discussion in https://github.com/eclipse/xtext/issues/1721.

Java based API for new Formatter

With Xtext 2.24 we introduce a new preliminary API that allows you to implement the Formatter(2) in Java instead of Xtend. With Java 11 and later, you can use local variable type inference and the equivalent of commonly used extensions are available via delegate methods. We encourage you to give it a try and to give feedback.

Xtext Generator

The (new) Xtext Generator is now API.

Language Server Protocol

The Xtext Language Server Protocol (LSP) implementation has now an experimental API for Quickfix code actions (have a look at the IQuickFixProvider interface and QuickFixCodeActionService class).

Eclipse Integration

  • We did a number of performance improvments for editing .xtext files.
  • We fixed a flaw in ParallelBuilderParticipant that may have lead to missing generated files.
  • The Validate Action now should behave correctly with Fast, Normal and Expensive Checks.

No Xtend

The Xtext codebase (besides Xtend) is now, with a small number of exceptions in the language generation area, xbase and tests, completely written in Java and thus more proof in a future without Xtend.

Upgrades

  • Eclipse Platform and JDT Maven dependencies were updated to the 4.17 / Eclipse 2020-09 versions.
  • MWE(2) was updated to 2.12.0/1.6.0.
  • LSP4J was updated to 0.10.0, but you still can run it with 0.9.0 too.
  • Xtext now uses ASM 9.
  • Xtext Web uses JQuery 3.5.1.
  • We are now Junit 5.7 compatible.

Credits

The Xtext 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 to all repositories except xtext-xtend):

  • Christian Dietrich (itemis)
  • Karsten Thoms (Karakun)
  • Nico Prediger (itemis)
  • Arne Deutsch (itemis)
  • Sebastian Zarnekow (independent)
  • Neeraj Bhusare (Zafin)
  • Frank Benoit (ETAS)
  • George Suaridze (1C-Soft)
  • Hannes Niederhausen (itemis)
  • Heinrich Weichert (AVL DiTEST)
  • Srinivas Iyer (Nash Technologies)
  • Tamas Miklossy (itemis)
  • Titouan Vervack (Sigasi)

Fixed Issues

As in every release cycle we were eagerly hunting down bugs, and reviewed and integrated plenty of contributions. For further details please refer to the following lists:

Xtext 2.23.0 Release Notes  Sep 1, 2020


Xtext 2.23.0 is a maintenance release.

Call to Action: Secure the future maintenance of Xtext

As you might have recognized, the number of people contributing to Xtext on a regular basis has declined over the past years and so has the number of contributions. At the same time the amount of work for basic maintenance has stayed the same or even increased with the new release cadence of Java and the Eclipse simultaneous release. Briefly: The future maintenance of Xtext is at risk. If you care, please join the discussion in https://github.com/eclipse/xtext/issues/1721.

Xtext, Xtend, Eclipse, and Java 11

The Eclipse Platform and Java Development Tools have decided to migrate to Java 11 with the new 2020-09 (4.17) release. Xtext and Xtend depend on these projects both for the integration into Eclipse as well as in the LSP and standalone mode. Xtext 2.23 still works with Java 8, but if you want to work with Xtext in Eclipse 2020-09 (4.17) you have to start your Tycho builds with Java 11 as well as launch your Runtime Eclipse Applications with Java 11.

We decided to follow suit to close a window of opportunity for hard to find bugs. Therefore, the version 2.24 of Xtext and Xtend which is due along with Eclipse 2020-12 will be the first release that depends on Java 11. Please feel encouraged to join the discussion in https://github.com/eclipse/xtext/issues/1804 if you have any concerns, general comments or other suggestions.

UI Testing

The AbstractCodeMiningTest and the AbstractMultiQuickfixTest base classes have been added to the org.eclipse.xtext.ui.testing package to provide a convenient way to test the code mining and multi-quickfix capabilities. The Xtext example projects and the Xtend code base have been extended by concrete test cases to demonstrate the usage of these framework classes.

Junit 5

InjectionExtension now supports the Junit 5 @Nested tests.

Core API

A protected method to get at the lazy proxy information of a LazyLinkingResource was added to enable subclasses to work with these.

Eclipse Integration

Quickfix improvements

Convert a terminal fragment to a terminal rule. It resolves the following errors:

  • A rule call in the parser rule points to a terminal fragment.
  • A hidden token in the grammar definition or a parser rule points to a terminal fragment.

Remove illegal hidden token definition. It resolves the following errors:

  • The hidden-token points to a parser rule, terminal fragment, or an enum rule.

Create a new rule definition. It resolves the following errors:

  • An undefined parser rule is cross-referenced.
  • An undefined enum, terminal, or a terminal fragment is cross-referenced.

(xtext-eclipse#1448)

Eclipse API

The class org.eclipse.xtext.ui.editor.reconciler.TemplatePositionUpdater is now public to be usable for clients.

Upgrades

  • Eclipse platform dependencies where updated (e.g org.eclipse.core.runtime:3.17.100 to 3.18.0).

Credits

The Xtext 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 to all repositories except xtext-xtend):

  • Christian Dietrich (itemis)
  • Nico Prediger (itemis)
  • Sebastian Zarnekow (independent)
  • Karsten Thoms (Karakun)
  • Tamas Miklossy (itemis)
  • Arne Deutsch (itemis)
  • Jan Koehnlein (TypeFox)
  • Neeraj Bhusare (Zafin)
  • Titouan Vervack (Sigasi)
  • Hendrik Eeckhaut (Sigasi)
  • Frank Benoit (ETAS)
  • Aaron R Miller
  • Ivan Nieves
  • Stéphane Galland (Université de Technologie de Belfort)

Fixed Issues

As in every release cycle we were eagerly hunting down bugs, and reviewed and integrated plenty of contributions. For further details please refer to the following lists: