News

JetBrains MPS 2.5.4 arrived

Here’s the news that you have been waiting for – 2.5.4 is out. (If you were actually waiting for news about 3.0, please read on). Grab 2.5.4 while it’s fresh. The release notes will give you full details on what’s changed.

Except for the usual doze of bug-fixes, 2.5.4 comes with one major new feature that is definitely worth your attention:

  • the ability for build scripts to rebuild an MPS project from scratch.

Without the need to regenerate in the MPS workbench or to keep your generated code in VCS, you just invoke ant generate on the command line and your whole MPS project gets regenerated, compiled and packaged. What a relieve!

There’s a catch, though. In order for the rebuild to be possible, your project must not contain bootstrapping dependencies, e.g. a module must not use a language, which requires that same module for generation. Chasing such dependency violations and hunting them down can be a challenge without proper tools. To give you a hand, the Dependency Analyzer has been enhanced and we documented the required steps on a dedicated how-to page that will give you all relevant information and guide you through the process.

As a bonus, once you remove all bootstrapping dependencies from your projects, you’ll be in a good position to migrate them automatically to MPS 3.0 eventually.

Speaking of MPS 3.0 …

Yeah, we’ve slipped behind schedule with 3.0. The 3.0 codebase has undergone a major facelift. We’ve refactored the core API so that MPS will provide stable and robust set of well documented APIs to allow access to the models directly from your code. It will also help us evolve MPS faster. The price we pay now will certainly pay off in the near future.

The features mentioned in the (updated) roadmap for 3.0 are gradually being added and we are coming close to a point when the 3.0 EAP will open. Just give us a few more weeks, please.
You’ll soon be able to put your hands on

  • Multiple editors per concept
  • Tight IntelliJ IDEA integration
  • Smoother BaseLanguage editor

and many other improvements.


Develop with pleasure!
-JetBrains MPS Team

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