Bootstrapping, Default Formatting, and Skeleton Editing in the Spoofax Language Workbench

Language workbenches are tools that help language designers to design and implement (domain-specific) programming languages, aiming to produce a full featured programming environment from a high-level language description. A recent paper, resulting from a series of language workbench challenge workshops, describes a collection of benchmark problems for language workbench research. In this paper, we describe solutions to two of these benchmark problems in the Spoofax Language Workbench, i.e. default formatting and skeleton editing. In addition, we introduce a new benchmark problem — bootstrapping of meta-languages in a workbench — and describe the support for bootstrapping we developed for Spoofax.