Tooling Architecture

[Sam Gammon (sgammon)]

Summary

Opening this discussion to explore how tooling might work in a batteries-included, polyglot-style runtime. In a world where your runtime can speak multiple dialects, and has built-in tools like a bundler/package manager/test runner/etc, how do those work?

In a software engineer's day, or a software component's lifecycle, several tools might be touched or used to various degrees. Roughly, in terms of frequency of use:

• Language server
• Formatters, linters, static analyzers, type checkers
• Test runner
• Debugger
• Package managers
• Coverage tooling / reporting
• Profiler

Good tooling is often praised as the best part of a good language. By improving the developer's tooling on a polyglot-first basis, we will be offering features which are meaningful in a developer's day and while staying in a valuable area: most of these tools do not exist how they should yet.

Approach

I think we should survey current approaches and lessons learned in other runtimes, and then propose some options along the lines of user customizability / load-from-deps (the way Node or Python do this), vs. built-in best-of-breed tools (a-la Bun, Rust, et al).

Goals

• Smooth tooling experience in Elide, which covers major use cases in all supported languages
• Ideally, embedded into the runtime in some way ("batteries included")
• But without bloating the runtime or locking the user to specific tooling in any unreasonable way

Non-goals

• Development of new tooling specific to each language

Prior Art/Relevant Material

GraalVM's Tooling

GraalVM has a notion of tools which work with Truffle. There are several tools which are available to integrate into Elide (some of which already are integrated into Elide):

Tool	Description
VisualVM	Popular JVM instrumentation tool
Insight	Tracing and runtime behavior instrumentation
Profiler	Polyglot instrumentation for profiling
Coverage	Polyglot instrumentation for coverage measurement
IGV	Visualizes execution/compile graphs; mostly for runtime dev
Chrome Debugger	Polyglot support for Chrome's debugger protocol, similar to Node
Language Server	Polyglot language server via GVM bindings
Debug Adapter Protocol (DAP)	Polyglot support for Chrome/VSCode's debugger protocol

Extended Tooling

Certain libraries or instrumentation tools exist for further construction of tools:

• Java Virtual Machine Tool Interface (JVMTI) is supported in GVM
• NodeProf can be used to instrument GraalVM programs