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/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: