Building development tools interactively using the EKEKO meta-programming library

Abstract

EKEKO is a Clojure library for applicative logic meta-programming against an Eclipse workspace. EKEKO has been applied successfully to answering program queries (e.g., “does this bug pattern occur in my code?”), to analyzing project corpora (e.g., “how often does this API usage pattern occur in this corpus?”), and to transforming programs (e.g., “change occurrences of this pattern as follows”) in a declarative manner. These applications rely on a seamless embedding of logic queries in applicative expressions. While the former identify source code of interest, the latter associate error markers with, compute statistics about, or rewrite the identified source code snippets. In this paper, we detail the logic and applicative aspects of the EKEKO library. We also highlight key choices in their implementation. In particular, we demonstrate how a causal connection with the Eclipse infrastructure enables building development tools interactively on the Clojure read-eval-print loop.