We are proud to announce Xtext and Xtend 2.15! As you can learn from the release notes (Xtext and Xtend), the focus of this release was on stability, quality and performance. Especially the Xtend Gradle build could be improved significantly and the integration with Eclipse 2018-09 works like a charm, now.
In the last three months, it turned out to be rather challenging to keep up with the new concept of rolling releases at Eclipse. We had to learn a lot and more than once we did this the hard way. In the end we are pretty satisfied with the outcome, though. And besides quite some fundamental groundwork on the process-side to get ready for the shorter 3 month release cadence, we did also find the time to squeeze in a few goodies that will make working with Xtext DSLs even more pleasant.
One of the noticeable adjustments, that we made, is the improved progress reporting. We redid the logic that tracks the remaining number of files during a build in Eclipse and are now issuing more fine grained feedback to the user. This was possible due to recent changes in the Eclipse platform. We do no longer face a performance degradation when reporting on such a granularity so it was about time to provide more insights on what's going on during a full build.
Besides the fact that Xtext does now correctly mark test folders as such, when you create a new project, we are constantly working on improvements of the APIs for testing various Xtext services. This time, the infrastructure to test lexical and semantic coloring was added. It greatly simplifies testing of custom highlighting logic.
Also Xtend is now aware of the JUnit annotations and will flag methods with an invalid return type (read: non-void) already in the editor so you get immediate feedback if the type inference has computed some undesired return type for your test method. Especially when working with fluent test APIs this may be very handy.
The 2.15 release has more goodies that you can read about in the release notes of Xtext or Xtend. Being it the improved support for Task markers in Eclipse, the tweaks to the handling of files, that are external to your workspace, a command-line interface for creation of projects or new APIs in the core, make sure you do not miss some interesting bit or piece.
As usual, if you face any issues with Xtext 2.15 or if you do have any other feedback, please don't hesitate to get in touch with us on GitHub, via the newsgroup or simply drop us a comment.