Support more (modern) programming languages

[tsaglam]

We want to extend the capabilities of JPlag to support more modern languages.
Thus I propose:

• Merging existing but outdated frontends from forks for Scala, R, and Jupyter Notebook (see Merge additional frontends from (semi-) active forks #202)
  • Some of them might not be easily mergeable, thus this should be evaluated beforehand
• Creating new frontends based on available ANTLR grammars for Kotlin, Go, and Rust
• Creating a small set of tests for each new frontend (related to Lightweight frontend tests and frontend-testutils (+ JUnit 5 for every test) #408 and Dedicated front-end tests (in separate projects?) #296)
• If there is time, modernizing the Python frontend (see Test and adopts fixes to the Python grammar #280 and for reference also Update Python frontend to 3.6 #34)

For each frontend, a parser is required that parses the source code. Then, in an abstraction step, a subset of the tokens of the language AST need to be transformed into generic JPlag tokens. These tokens can be then passed as a token list to JPlag.

Steps to take:

• Understand how language frontends work and how they are designed (look at the C# and Java frontends)
• Incrementally, add new frontends (from forks or from scratch) and test them
• New frontends should contain a readme that documents what tokens are extracted and why
• Add documentation on how to create new frontends
• (Optionally) modernize the Python frontend

Current state:

• Rlang
• Kotlin
• Golang
• Scala
• Rust

[ijaureguialzo]

Hello, maybe it's not considered a "modern" language, but I would love to see SQL and PL/SQL supported by JPlag.

Thanks for the awesome work.

[chr15t0ph]

I would love to see JavaScript supported by JPlag.

(I already use jplag for Java courses and would love to have it for JavaScript courses, too.)
Kind regards, Christoph

[tsaglam]

I cannot promise that we will find time to add the languages requested here. But in the future, there will be comprehensive documentation on how to add language frontends with relatively low effort.

[ijaureguialzo]

That would be nice. If there would be some kind of framework, I could spare some time and try to do it myself.

[tsaglam]

@ijaureguialzo @chr15t0ph we added documentation regarding adding new languages to our wiki:
https://github.com/jplag/JPlag/wiki/4.-Adding-New-Languages

[tsaglam]

Closed, as we now collect language requests in #685.