I sincerely hope this dies a quick death.
Java with its jars and infrastructure already makes it plenty convenient to work with resources without them having to be in your face when you are editing the file. Good IDE lets you move between the resource file and the code with a single click.
Well, not exactly. Most IDEs do NOT support clicking through a generated method call to the corresponding element in a resource file. Manifold is all about that. See it in action: http://manifold.systems/images/graphql.mp4
The Manifold fragments discussed here address only a narrow band of use-cases where embedding the resource improves the dev experience, like with queries and such. It's not for everyone, though.
Java comments are Java. Embedding = in Java source, which requires some kind of delimiter, so the author conveniently repurposed multiline comments for that which is fine. Also, if you read the post, it clearly states you embed fragments in either comments or strings, if the fragments is a declaration vs a value.
> I sincerely hope this dies a quick death.
Why the hostility? If you have something constructive to offer, great, otherwise this is the kind of comment that gives HN a bad rep.
Well, if you want to leverage Java's static type system (and why not?), the answer is, yes. I imagine you'd want type and member references to the other language to resolve statically using the compiler, right? Similarly, why not have the same functionality in your IDE? Plus code completion, usage searching, refactoring?
Now, as I mentioned in an earlier comment, the embedding part of this addresses just a small segment of use-cases e.g., scoped query editing. The vast majority of other cases work directly against resource files, type-safely. Read more about that here:
[1] https://docs.oracle.com/javase/8/docs/jdk/api/javac/tree/com...
Have you considered an approach based on annotations and multi-line strings? I'm not sure string constants are valid targets for annotations but maybe that could be added to the language?
@Language(name="Javascript")
"""
function callBark(aBarker) {
aBarker.bark();
}
"""Yes, Manifold already supports Java 15 multi-line strings (aka text blocks) like this:
var myValue = """
[>.js<]
function foo() {
return "hi";
}
foo();
""";
https://graphql-code-generator.com/docs/plugins/java
Not sure if there's a strong use-case in general here. Even Groovy code, which is a popular choice for JVM DSL languages, has pretty excellent stub generation.
[1] https://github.com/manifold-systems/manifold/tree/master/man...
Extending the compiler is great... until it isn't. Imagine a feature in java the language not working correctly due to a compiler bug. Debugging or working around this issue could be very difficult. With compiler extensions, you are now widening the opportunity for this type of bug to occur.
More principled code generation systems like Racket's macro system do in fact let you expand the code to see what's generated while avoiding having a separate build step, and even have a macro debugger for interactive debugging. Mainstream languages have a ways to go before we get this kind of tooling for language extension frameworks. Until then, I think I prefer having a separate build step with on-disk, visible, and debug-able code.