News

JetBrains MPS 3.2 EAP just started

For quite a while you’ve seen us issuing only bug-fix releases to MPS 3.1. Although we’ve managed to sneak in a few handy improvements here and there, in general, there wasn’t much cool new stuff for you to try out.
Today is the best time for a more adventurous step – the features that we’ve been preparing for several months are now ready to face the world and so we’ve packaged them into the first in a series of 3.2 EAP releases. A healthy doze of new features is waiting for your test ride:

  • Language migrations give language designers the tooling to track multiple language versions and help users migrate code between versions of a language.
  • Smooth parentheses support in BaseLanguage expressions has been further enhanced – parentheses can be inserted or removed at any position any time and MPS will instantly re-match the remaining parentheses and rebalance the model.
  • Implementation stripping for language definition gives you the means to protect the sources of your languages by excluding them from the generated language artifacts and thus protect the intellectual property encoded in the definition of your languages
  • Rethinking of the generator plan further speeds up the generation process
  • New generator dependency types allow you to better capture the relationships between generators.
  • The speed of running unit tests has been improved considerably by employing in-process test execution as well as clever cache re-use.
  • JDK 8 runtime support allows MPS to run on the most recent JDK.

Please read a dedicated What’s new in MPS 3.2 document to learn all the details about the new features. If you’re not in hurry, you may also like to check the full list of the closed tickets in the release notes.

Important note: When opening an existing project of yours in MPS 3.2 for the first time, you may need to run all the migrations listed in the Tools -> Migration 3.2 in order to upgrade the project correctly.

This first EAP release unfortunately comes without the IDEA plugin. Making the plugin work smoothly in IDEA showed to be more challenging than originally anticipated and we need some additional time to make it reliable. We decided not to hold you back from experimenting with the new MPS features and finish the proper wiring of the plugin before the next EAP release.

We are certain that you will enjoy grabbing MPS 3.2 EAP and giving it a spin. Please tell us about your experience and thoughts. Help us shape the upcoming MPS release. We’re tuned in.

Develop with pleasure!
-JetBrains MPS Team

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