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Using Spoofax to Support Online Code Navigation

Author Peter D. Mosses

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Author Details

Peter D. Mosses
  • Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands
  • Swansea University, UK

Funding

The work reported here is part of the PLanCompS project, which was funded by an EPSRC grant to Swansea University from 2011 to 2015 (EP/I032495/1) in collaboration with colleagues at Royal Holloway University of London and City University in London.

Acknowledgements

Eelco Visser (1966–2022) was a visionary leader. For more than two decades, I have benefited greatly from reading his persuasive publications, listening to his animated presentations, and discussing topics of common interest with him - especially modular language specification. Since 2012, I have also been an enthusiastic user of the Spoofax language workbench, developed by Eelco and his Programming Languages group at TU Delft. This paper reports on some work that I carried out as a visitor at TU Delft since 2016. I am grateful to the reviewers of a previous version for helpful comments and suggestions.

Cite AsGet BibTex

Peter D. Mosses. Using Spoofax to Support Online Code Navigation. In Eelco Visser Commemorative Symposium (EVCS 2023). Open Access Series in Informatics (OASIcs), Volume 109, pp. 21:1-21:12, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2023)
https://doi.org/10.4230/OASIcs.EVCS.2023.21

Abstract

Spoofax is a language workbench. A Spoofax language specification generally includes name resolution: the analysis of bindings between definitions and references. When browsing code in the specified language using Spoofax, the bindings appear as hyperlinks, supporting precise name-based code navigation. However, Spoofax cannot be used for browsing code in online repositories. This paper is about a toolchain that uses Spoofax to generate hyperlinked twins of code repositories. These generated artefacts support the same precise code navigation as Spoofax, and can be browsed online. The technique has been prototyped on the CBS (Component-Based Semantics) specification language developed by the PLanCompS project, but could be used on any language after specifying its name resolution in Spoofax.

Subject Classification

ACM Subject Classification
  • Information systems → Web interfaces
  • Software and its engineering → Integrated and visual development environments
  • Software and its engineering → Development frameworks and environments
Keywords
  • Spoofax language workbench
  • name resolution
  • precise code navigation

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