Mark Sujew
Christian SchneiderOur initial release of Langium back in June has garnered a lot of positive feedback. Members of language engineering communities were eager to try the framework, propose new feature ideas and report bugs. Additionally, we had our first opportunity to speak publicly about Langium at the Strumenta Community Meetup.
The new release comes with many new features and improvements to the framework.
Previously, Langium only supported working with the currently opened file. Any other files in your workspace were ignored.
With the newly introduced workspace management system you can reference elements of your DSL across multiple files within your workspace folder. After starting the language server, all files matching your custom DSL file extension are automatically loaded and available for referencing. Handling large workspaces is also now boosted by workspace indexing allowing for fast cross reference checking.
We continue improving the editing support for Langium which also includes new default implementations and APIs for common Language Server Protocol features.
As always, downstream users of Langium are encouraged to build their own implementations on top of our default implementations.
Langium has seen a lot of internal improvements for this release, most notably in regards to the parsing infrastructure.
Compared to our first version, after the new release the Langium CLI will no longer generate TypeScript code for the parser. Instead, the parser will be built completely in memory.
This does not only improve parsing speed, but also allows users to overwrite our new TokenBuilder.
It is in charge of building parsing token types, i.e., splitting the input string into tokens and determining their types. The tokens will then be consumed by the parser.
Besides enabling more fine grained control over the lexing and parsing steps, this fixes a bunch of bugs which accompanied the old generated parser.
When testing your custom service implementations, you can now rely on Langium’s new unit testing infrastructure, which is available for most LSP related services.
In total, we were able to close 42 issues and merge 60 pull requests since our last release. If you’re interested in everything that happened during the last months, you can take a look at our changelog.
After the release of this version, we will focus on the Langium website, where we will publish documentation and tutorials for Langium. In the meantime, you’ll find a getting started guide at the npm package documentation.
Additionally, we already have more features planned for our next release. Most of them will be related to the Langium grammar itself, like being able to embed multiple languages within a single Langium based language server.
Stay tuned for more updates on Langium by watching the repository over at GitHub. Also, if you’re interested in contributing to Langium, consider joining TypeFox. We’re hiring!
Last but certainly not least, a big Thank You to the following people who contributed to this release of Langium:
Mark is the driving force behind a lot of TypeFox’s open-source engagement. He leads the development of the Eclipse Langium and Theia IDE projects. Away from his day job, he enjoys bartending and music, is an avid Dungeons & Dragons player, and works as a computer science lecturer at a Hamburg University.
Christian is a seasoned DSL enthusiast with a decade of expertise in language tooling and graphical visualizations. While striving for innovative and sustainable solutions, he still pays attention to details. Quite often you’ll find Christian nearby the sea, with the seagulls providing a pleasant ambience to his meetings.
