Description Jurgen Vinju 2011-03-30 05:00:02 EDT

Rascal is a domain specific language for meta programming, e.g. the construction of refactoring tools, static analysis, DSL implementation, etc. It is rooted in Eclipse IMP, using its components pdb.values for the language run-time and imp.runtime for IDE features. 

* This contribution is of considerable size (150.000 LOC, of which 30.000 generated approx.)
* It has a number of dependencies on third-party jars, namely
   * "joda-time"
   * "jetty" webserver
   * "processing" visualization toolkit
   * "asm" JVM bytecode assembly framework
   * some others that we might remove before doing the contribition (jdom,  jline, xerces)
   * Rascal consists of two main products: Rascal run-time and Rascal-Eclipse. The first is the language with its interpreter and commandline interface, the second is its IDE and IDE generation facilities for other programming languages (dependent on IMP run-time).

* This contribution is copyright CWI 2008-2011, created by Jurgen Vinju (myself), Paul Klint, Tijs van der Storm, Mark Hills and Arnold Lankamp (all CWI employed).

* The current license is BSD4, excluding the aforementioned third-party dependencies. We are willing to switch to EPLv4 if so required.

* We intend to host a git repository at CWI, from which we (committers on IMP) may continuously push updates to Eclipse IMP's svn repository. This will allow us to collaborate with master and phd students that are not Eclipse committers.

* We will leave out a number of sub-projects of Rascal which depend on GPL licensed libraries or are otherwise unfit to be hosted at Eclipse.org. In the future, we intent to support "Rascal plugins" for users wishing to install such extra software from a site hosted at CWI in The Netherlands.

* It will be required to make Paul Klint, Tijs van der Storm, Mark Hills and Arnold Lankamp committers on the IMP project to facilitate the development on Rascal.

* Rascal is quite alive, but very much an incubation project. We currently use the label "alpha" to manage expectations of our clients.

We would very much appreciate contributing Rascal to IMP, since Rascal was designed to fit with the mission statement of IMP. Rascal started with the inception of IMP's pdb.values library, was then developed separately at CWI for 3 years, and is now ready to get back to IMP.

This request is the start of the proces of contributing Rascal. I realize we will have to split this up into a number of smaller contributions, especially regarding the third-party dependencies.