ExtendJ

The JastAdd extensible Java compiler.

License & Copyright

• Copyright (c) 2005-2008, Torbjörn Ekman
• Copyright (c) 2005-2016, ExtendJ Committers

All rights reserved.

ExtendJ is covered by the Modified BSD License. The full license text is distributed with this software. See the LICENSE file.

Tools Used

ExtendJ uses these libraries:

• JastAdd2 R20130212, Copyright (c) 2005-2013, The JastAdd Team. JastAdd2 is covered by the Modified BSD License. See the file licenses/JastAdd2-BSD for the full license text.
• Beaver 0.9.11, Copyright (c) 2003-2011 Alexander Demenchuk. Beaver is covered by the Modified BSD License. See the file licenses/Beaver-BSD for the full license text.
• JFlex 1.4.3, Copyright (c) 1998-2009 Gerwin Klein. JFlex is covered by the GNU General Public License. See the file licenses/JFlex-GPL for the full license text.
• JastAddParser, Copyright (c) 2005, The JastAdd Team. JastAddParser is covered by the Modified BSD License. See the file licenses/JastAddParser-BSD for the full license text.
• RagDoll R20120208, Copyright (c) 2011-2012 Jesper Öqvist. RagDoll is covered by the GNU General Public License Version 2, with the Classpath Exception. See the file licenses/RagDoll-GPL for the full license text.

The only library used by ExtendJ at runtime is the Beaver runtime component beaver-rt.jar.

Building

ExtendJ is built using Apache Ant. Each module has it's own Ant script, and there is a toplevel Ant script that contains targets to build ExtendJ with support for various versions of Java. The default target will build ExtendJ for the highest supported Java version.

If you have Ant installed you can get a list of available build targets by entering the following in a terminal:

$ ant -p

Running

Usage:

java JavaCompiler <options> <source files>
  -verbose                  Output messages about what the compiler is doing
  -classpath <path>         Specify where to find user class files
  -sourcepath <path>        Specify where to find input source files
  -bootclasspath <path>     Override location of bootstrap class files
  -extdirs <dirs>           Override location of installed extensions
  -d <directory>            Specify where to place generated class files
  -nowarn                   Disable warning messages
  -help                     Print a synopsis of standard options
  -version                  Print version information

Extensions

ExtendJ is intended to be an extensible compiler, however right now we are changing things in ExtendJ rapidly and breaking backward-compatibility.

The ExtendJ API up to version 7.1 was mostly much unchanged for several years. Since version 7.1 though many things have changed in ExtendJ in order to remove side effects, fix errors, and make the code more understandable. The next release should be much more stable, but right now ExtendJ is changing very much. Most of these non-compatible changes have happened since we moved the main development code to bitbucket. What you see in the bitbucket repository should be considered unstable.

See the extension migration guide for more information about migrating an extension from an older version of ExtendJ to the latest development version.

Development

Some useful scripts for ExtendJ development can be found at the JJScripts repository.

###Coding Style

Note: The source code of ExtendJ does not fully follow this style guide yet. We are in a conversion process to get the code consistent, but it takes a lot of work.

For the most part, JastAdd code should follow Google's Java Style Guide. JastAdd code should use a 100 character maximum line width, two-space indentation, as in the linked style guide. Line breaking rules are also generally the same.

Some things to note about JastAdd code:

• Don't let synthesized and inherited attributes share the same name. That is a sure way to cause unexpected behaviour.
• The refine constructs can cause lines to be very long, so it's a good idea to consistently always insert a line break after aspect name part of a refinement.
• If you have a long equation, prefer to add a line break after the first equals sign.

###Debugging

If ExtendJ should generate faulty bytecode there are a number of different tools that can be used to diagnose the problem.

• javap comes with the JDK
• asm can be downloaded from http://asm.ow2.org/

javap can be used to disassemble compiled bytecode:

$ javap -verbose -c Test.class

ASM by OW2 Consortium can be used for advanced instrumentation and analysis of bytecode. There is also a useful plugin for eclipse called "Bytecode Outline" from OW2.