Xtend – Modernized Java

I've used xtend last year, before I switched to Scala. Eclipse integration is better with Scala (autocompletion among others), and Scala has more to offer. Biggest pain point: stack traces point to the Java translations, not to xtend's source code. That made me switch to Scala.

&quot;Modernized Java&quot;, it&#x27;s basically a slightly uglier C#.<p>Not that I&#x27;d argue C# isn&#x27;t modern, it&#x27;s in fact one of the most &#x27;modern&#x27; languages I can imagine at the moment, but it&#x27;s kind of wry that C# did such a good job of keeping current where Java lagged so terribly behind.

I don&#x27;t see any advantages in this over Scala.

Oh, how many &quot;next Java&quot; options we have now... Kotlin, Ceylon, Gosu, Xtend, Java 8 :) (Scala not mentioned as I refuse to call it &quot;the next Java&quot;, it&#x27;s a new player)

It&#x27;s like Coffeescript for Java...<p>I hereby suggest it be renamed &quot;Coffee&quot;.

I&#x27;ve used Xtend many times over the last few years.  In fact, I&#x27;m using it right now at my &quot;real&quot; job for an internal project.  I&#x27;m mostly a Clojure guy who still has to do a lot of Java work to pay the bills - when I can&#x27;t use Clojure on a project, Xtend is a breath of fresh air.<p>The current form of Xtend has been around for a few years now, and has steadily improved.  Its origins go back many years, to the OpenArchitectureWare project where its predecessor (called Xpand) was used as a templating and model transformation language for the framework.  Since oaw moved to the Eclipse foundation (5-6 years ago?), most of the tools have been dropped, reworked, or merged in with other Eclipse projects.<p>Out of all this reworking for the new generation of Xtext came Xbase, which is an expression language that you can just drop into your DSL and have pretty much the entire Java language available (type system, expressions, scoping, etc.).  If you&#x27;re doing serious modeling&#x2F;DSL work, this is about as good as it gets without going to something like MPS (which is awesome, but has its own set of limitations).  Xtend is essentially this Xbase language in stand-alone form, with a few other goodies.  There is also another project called Xcore which lets you create EMF models in plain text, mixing behavior along with structure, and it uses Xtend&#x2F;Xbase as well.  This is one of the reasons why I&#x27;m not too worried about Xtend becoming &quot;abandonware&quot; or anything like that - its main components are pretty essential to some key projects in the Eclipse ecosystem.<p>So why wouldn&#x27;t you just use (Scala, Groovy, etc.)?  Well for one thing, I can (and have) bring Java developers up to speed on Xtend in about an hour (less if they know anything about functional programming).  You can see some benefits in more concise code right away, and it only takes a couple days to get productive with it.  No one can do that in Scala or Clojure.  If you&#x27;re looking for a strategic platform to build your next JVM architecture on - well, that&#x27;s not really Xtend&#x27;s place, you&#x27;re looking for Scala or Clojure (hint - the latter).  But there are a lot of projects where Xtend is a very nice fit, and as a bonus, I&#x27;ve found that developers who learn Xtend first have a much easier time learning a more &quot;serious&quot; language like Scala or Clojure later.

Compared to other JVM languages Xtend seems to be seeing very little adoption or interest. I have yet to encounter anyone who&#x27;s actually using it.

Xtend seems to be a very conservative, but sensible iteration on Java. Does anybody have some experience with it, knows some pitfalls, etc.?

MPS from jet-brains offers another good option something called baseLanguage with very good DSL equivalents for a lot of use-cases combined with one more called SModel language.But its not parser based one like xtend is , its AST based projection editing and manipulation platform.I&#x27;ve been learning it for sometime.

What I would hope is that these features get rolled back into Java. Xtend could be a testing ground that shows how something would work, similar to the way browsers have their own proprietary implementations of an idea that then serve as examples to the W3C.

coming from java, xtend is probably the best choice right now (also compared to java8) because you are up and running in few hours. really! and the development time will decrease significantly. You can create full projects in a fraction of time. Active annotations are also very useful to generate common boring code (Logging, patterns, ...) also from configuration or HTML files, or to generate files like javascript to call your backend service. the only drawback is that it only works in eclipse. Eclipse has full support, meaning that debugging, refactoring, click from stacktrace and so on are available and work perfectly. just try it for 30 minutes, you&#x27;ll not come back!

This all looks OK to me but my first worry would be ease of debugging. I eyeballed the doc but couldn&#x27;t see anything specific to debugging. Anyone has some experience they could share?

They surely need to find a solution for proper debugging. Nobody likes mental gymnastics needed when debug stack traces to a language other than the language you write the s&#x2F;w in.

JVM languages seem to be the flavour of the month at the moment. Why do IDE makers feel the need to invent their own languages?

Better to use Java 8 with Lombok extensions.

Xtend seems for me to be like coffeescript. It gives nice syntax like blocks to java.

Xtend has been around for a while and I think one of the reasons why it didn&#x27;t catch on is because it generates Java, which severely limit its performances.<p>These days, &quot;modernized Java&quot; would probably be Ceylon or Kotlin.

What&#x27;s that «guillemets» nonsense??

Everyone and their dog is writing a language these days. Oh well.<p>Id rather improve on applications and libraries we already have.