Running a Rascal program from outside the REPL - rascal

I'd really like to be able to run some Rascal's program from outside the REPL (e.g. as part of a script, or called from another program). What I'm using Rascal for is and intermediate stage in a larger framework so I am wondering what the best way to go about integrating executing the Rascal code from another program.

Right now the best way is to package your code together with the Rascal shell executable jar. There is a convenience class JavaToRascal for calling into Rascal code. Sometimes it requires some thinking to add your own modules to the Rascal search path using IRascalSearchPathContributors, but if you include a RASCAL.MF file with the right properties it all should go automatically.
If you are thinking of an Eclipse plugin, then the best way is to let your plugin depend on the rascal-eclipse plugin and use ProjectEvaluatorFactory to get access to the interpreter.
Caveat: since we are moving to a compiled system, the code you write for this kind of integration will change. This is the reason we haven't documented the API for calling Rascal from Java yet.

As I was pondering the same question, this is the (maybe trivial) answer I came up with:
java -jar /path/to/rascal-shell-stable.jar path/to/myProgram.rsc
You have to be aware that Rascal calculates module names from the current directory (don't know if it supports something like Java's CLASS_PATH), so in the above example myProgram.rsc should have a module declaration of module path::to::myProgram. Calculated and declared module name have to match.

Related

Evaluating Rascal's Performance?

I want to evaluate the performance of Rascal for a given rewrite system that I've written. I'm wondering if there's a good way of doing it?
Ideally, I'd generate some compiled Java classes from the system and then run them manually against my inputs. Is there an easy or recommended way to do it?
Cheers,
One way to do this is to use the functions in the library util::Benchmark. Typically, you could write something like
cpuType( (){ call_the_function_I_want_to_observe(); } ). This will execute your function and print the cpu time used.
Note that Rascal can be executed in two ways: interpreted and compiled which makes a big difference when measuring performance. We are working hard at the moment to fully integrate the compiler in the Eclipse IDE, but a stand alone version is available as well. This can be called as java -Xss8m -jar rascal-0.8.4-SNAPSHOT.jar --compiledREPL followed by at least values for directories for sources (--src), and binaries (--bin). Here rascal-0.8.4-SNAPSHOT.jar (but most likely named differently) is downloaded from the https://update.rascal-mpl.org/console/rascal-shell-unstable.jar.
If you need more information, don't hesitate to ask for more details: this part of our tool chain is unfortunately still undocumented.

Dart: Possible to exchange source code on the fly in a running system?

In this article it says: "The Dart VM reads and executes source code, which means there is no compile step between edit and run.". Does that mean that you can exchange source-code on the fly in a running Dart system like in Erlang? Maybe the compiler is removed from the runtime system and then this is no longer possible. So that's why I'm asking.
Dart is run "natively" only in Dartium, which is a flavour of Chrome with DartVM. When you develop an application you still need to compile it it to JavaScript. This way you get fast development lifecycle and in the end you can compile code to JS. Because it's compiled code there is lots more room for compiler to run optimisations on the code. So from my perspective, the compiler is still there and I don't think you would be able to replace code at runtime.
You can send around source code and run it, but it would need to be in a separate isolate. Isolates do have some relationship to Erlang concepts.
The Dart VM doesn't support hot swapping (Called live edit in V8). However, based on mailing list discussions, it sounds like this is something that the authors do want to support in the future.
However, as the others have mentioned, it is possible to dynamically load code into another isolate.

Scripting language for code blocks

I got code::blocks as my C/C++ compiler along with C++ for dummies, but my only problem is with a obscure scripting language that I have never heard of before; "Squirrel". Is it possible to change the scripting language of code::blocks to something more familiar to me, like lua?
It seems doable in theory. Whether it is doable in practice, hard to say. Here is what you would need to do:
create a folder src/sdk/scripting/lua in which you put the Lua interpreter (+ Lua libraries like io, math etc) source code and create project file for it
create a folder in src/sdk/scripting/lua_bindings where you put your Lua bindings: the C++ files that allow Lua scripts access to the host application. I recommend you use a tool like SWIG to generate them (codeblocks uses SqPlus). This involves determining what code-blocks functions/classes you want to export, creating one or more .i files, running SWIG on them, put the generated files going into "lua_bindings"; create a DLL project for the bindings
Create a src/lua_scripts in which you put the Lua equivalent of scripts found in src/scripts; or rather, a subset of those scripts, because it is unlikely you will want to export to Lua everything that is available via Squirrel if you're just following examples from a book
Find where Squirrel interpreter is instantiated in codeblocks and where RegisterBindings is called; replace it with instantiation of a Lua interpreter and call your luaopen_codeblocks which you will have created via SWIG (no need for a RegisterLuaBindings if you use SWIG, it does that for you)
Find where the various scripts are called by codeblocks (see http://wiki.codeblocks.org/index.php?title=Scripting_Code::Blocks). Call the equivalent Lua scripts (which are in lua_scripts -- you'll surely have to copy this to the installation folder for code-blocks). For example the startup.script, which is the Squirrel script that codeblocks automatically looks for at startup, is run by the following code in src/src/app.cpp:
// run startup script
try
{
wxString startup = ConfigManager::LocateDataFile(_T("startup.script"), sdScriptsUser | sdScriptsGlobal);
if (!startup.IsEmpty())
Manager::Get()->GetScriptingManager()->LoadScript(startup);
}
catch (SquirrelError& exception)
{
Manager::Get()->GetScriptingManager()->DisplayErrors(&exception);
}
I think that's about it.
Naturally based on how extensive your scripting is, you may cut some corners, but as you can see, this is not for the faint of heart!

How to get type info from Go compiled packages in language x?

I want to write a simple editor with basic autocomplete functionality for the Go language as a pet project. How would one go about doing it? I took a look at the Go plugins for Eclipse and IntelliJ, but they were too big for me to comprehend (not to mention getting one to compile).
The Go standard library offers the building blocks for a Go parser which
you can use to parse the source files and look for function definitions and the like.
There's also the godoc command which
already does what you want: extracting method definitions and it's documentation. You may look in the
source code to see how godoc is
working or use godoc directly.
This editor written in Go projects has a manageable amount of code,
you may look into it.
The de facto standard approach to this problem is to use nsf's gocode. I have tried it only in Vim - it works very well.
Even though there's ready made support for specific editors, gocode is not editor specific. It's a daemon with a communication protocol. It is thus usable from any program.

Any tools for clojure to parse java source code? [duplicate]

I'm trying to analyze Java source files with Clojure but I couldn't find a way to do that.
First, I thought using Eclipse AST plugin(by copying necessary JAR's to my Clojure project) but I gave up after seeing Eclipse AST's API(visitor based walker).
Then I've tried creating a Java parser with ANTLR. I can only find one Java 1.6 grammar for ANTLR( http://openjdk.java.net/projects/compiler-grammar/antlrworks/Java.g ) and it doesn't compile with latest ANTLR(here's the errors I'm getting ).
Now I have no idea how can I do that. At worst I'll try to go with Eclipse AST.
Does anyone know a better way to parse Java files with Clojure?
Thanks.
Edit: To clarify my point:
I need to find some specific method calls in Java projects and inspect it's parameters(we have multiple definitions of the method, with different type of parameters). Right now I have a simple solution written in Java(Eclipse AST) but I want to use Clojure in this project as much as possible.
... and it doesn't compile with latest ANTLR ...
I could not reproduce that.
Using ANTLR v3.2, I got some warnings, but no errors. Using both ANTLR v3.3 and v3.4 (latest version), I have no problems generating a parser.
You didn't mention how you're (trying) to generate a lexer/parser, but here's how it works for me:
java -cp antlr-3.4.jar org.antlr.Tool Java.g
EDIT 1
Here's my output when running the commands:
ls
wget http://www.antlr.org/download/antlr-3.4-complete.jar
wget http://openjdk.java.net/projects/compiler-grammar/antlrworks/Java.g
java -cp antlr-3.4-complete.jar org.antlr.Tool Java.g
ls
As you can see, the .java files of the lexer and parser are properly created.
EDIT 2
Instead of generating a parser yourself (from a grammar), you could use an existing parser like this one (Java 1.5 only AFAIK) and call it from your Clojure code.
It depends a bit on what you want to do - what are you hoping to get from the analysis?
If you want to actually compile Java or at least build an AST, then you probably need to go the ANTLR or Eclipse AST route. Java isn't that bad of a language to parse, but you still probably don't want to be reinventing too many wheels..... so you might as well build on the Eclipse and OpenJDK work.
If however you are just interesting in parsing the basic syntax and analysing certain features, it might be easier to use a simpler general purpose parser combinator library. Options to explore:
fnparse (Clojure, not sure how well maintained)
jparsec (Java, but can probably be used quite easily from Clojure)

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