Xtext 2.11 is released

After more than 7 months we finally got Xtext 2.11 out the door. Thanks for your patience. But good things come to those who wait! So go and get it while it’s hot. Xtext 2.11 comes with tons of bugfixes and improvements for the framework itself and for Xtend. If you want more technical details, please have a look at the release notes.

In this post, I want to highlight three points that are special to this release from my perspective.

With Xtext 2.11 we have split up our monolithic repository into multiple smaller parts. It was a huge effort to separate the Git repos without losing their history or tags, get the individual builds running, setup a staged CI and make all tests green again. But as of now, it should be much easier to fork, build and consume just the parts of the framework you are really interested in.

The biggest innovation in Xtext 2.11 is that it allows you to generate a language server for your language. This language server provides the smartness of your language to various editor clients such as VS Code, the Eclipse Generic Editor, Eclipse Che, Sublime, Eclipse Orion and hopefully more in the future. In short, we are close to provide support for your language in all major editors and IDEs by a single implementation. We have started the new Eclipse project LSP4J with an implementation of the language server protocol in Java to be picked up by other LSP implementors.

Last but not least, this release is a joint effort by multiple individuals and companies. I want to thank Christian Dietrich, Karsten Thoms, Holger Schill, Lorenzo Bettini and of course everybody from TypeFox for their great work. And of course thanks to the community for your helpful feedback and appreciation.