Hackathon in Delft: Gone!

I’ve been at it again. In the previous autumn/winter season, I spent a month in Delft, hacking on the Stratego/Spoofax program transformation infrastructure.

Now that another winter is here, I’ve had the good fortune to repeat what is slowly becoming a tradition. This year I even found time to reserve two months for a more extended hackathon.

Many really good things came of out of the stay. A few of the immediate results are:

• A command line interpreter for Spoofax that works on Linux/Unix/Windows.
• An interactive Spoofax console for Eclipse.
• A major revamp of the Spoofax build system that makes both development and bootstrapping a lot easier.
• A highly experimental plugin for scripting source code analysis and manipulation inside of Eclipse.

I am also involved in several on-going projects for bringing the necessary parts of the Spoofax infrastructure to the web. Interesting results should start popping up over the new few months.

As is the case for most startups, finding the time to contribute back to the upstream projects we use is always difficult. Whenever this happens, though, the payoff is often substantial.