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.

Hackathon in Delft: Go!

It’s that time of the year again. The glorious month of intensive parser implementation, compiler engineering and language workbenches — the essentials of any IDE — has arrived. I’ve retreated to the TU Delft campus for the month of November to hack on interactive language infrastructure for our startup, and to think big thoughts about IDEs and DSLs in general.

Our startup is a user of both Stratego and Spoofax, so it was only natural to join forces with Eelco Visser and some of his henchmen here in Delft, who are the maintainers of said projects.

For somewhat practical and somewhat nostalgic reasons, I decided to stay at the TU Delft campus. Campus life here already brings back memories of my year living at Cambridgelaan: the access to lightning fast broadband in your dorm room, the four minute walk to the lab, the 24-hour party people (aka Erasmus students), and the freedom to follow your biological clock.

Time for some commits:)