Approaches and Tools for Implementing Type Systems in Xtext

With the Xtext framework, building domain specific languages (DSLs) integrated into the Eclipse IDE has become increasingly popular and viable even for non-trivial domains. However, sophisticated DSLs may require advanced type checking capabilities, since they usually include expressions, types and the notion of type conformance. In this paper we compare a number of approaches and frameworks for implementing type systems for Xtext languages regarding flexibility, required effort and usability. We use a common case study to illustrate the trade-offs between the various tools.