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javaeclipselanguage-featuressyntactic-sugar

How would one go about adding (minor) syntactic sugars to Java?

Suppose I want to add minor syntactic sugars to Java. Just little things like adding regex pattern literals, or perhaps base-2 literals, or multiline strings, etc. Nothing major grammatically (at least for now).

How would one go about doing this?

Do I need to extend the bytecode compiler? (Is that possible?)

Can I write Eclipse plugins to do simple source code transforms before feeding it to the standard Java compiler?

Solution

  • Charles Nutter, the tech lead of JRuby, extended Javac with literal regular expressions. He had to change about 3 lines of case, as far I recall.

    See http://twitter.com/headius/status/1319031705

    And here is an awesome tutorial on how to add a new operator to javac, http://www.ahristov.com/tutorial/java-compiler.html

    For more links like that, see my list of Links for javac hackers .