[jdt-debug-dev] Evaluation engines

[Nikola Mihajlović <alamothe@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi,
I need to do evaluations programatically in the context of a stack frame of 
the suspended JVM. For this purpose, I have been using Eclipse's AST 
evaluation engine. But my code is a little more demanding than typical 
snippets in the expression view, in fact it is arbitary java code. In my 
opinion, because of its interpreting nature, AST EE will never be able to 
execute the code 100% correctly as it would have been executed by the VM.
So I was thinking about using the LocalEvaluationEngine instead. But I ran 
into a couple of obvious problems, one of them is 
https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=267561 , suggesting that Local 
EE hasn't been updated / used in a while. In fact, I discovered that only 
java snippet editor is still using it, and in a limited fashion (never in a 
context of a stack frame).
My question is: do you have plans to update / fix Local EE? Or you have 
stopped developing it?
I have an idea for a new evaluation engine, which would be based on hot code 
replace. It would be 100% correct, but it would require a dummy method in a 
class to operate on it's stack frames :-) (since JVM does not support adding 
new methods to classes). This makes it useless to be used generally, but for 
my own domain it might not be a big issue. Any input on this??

Thanks in advance