What are the disadvantages of Xtend? [closed]

Question

What are the disadvantages/drawbacks of using Xtend?

Fulvia

Answer 1

By asking the development team of Xtend, I got the following answer:

Dear Mr. X,

The major drawback compared to Java development might be that although Xtend's tooling is much better than the tooling provided by other languages, it's still not as good as what Eclipse can do for Java development.

Also note, that Xtend misses some features you might need when integrating with existing Java projects : - definition of constructors - field initialization - declaration of static methods and fields

The next release will have these features and will also come with an easy to use integration to run the compiler in Maven or Ant. It's planned for later this year.

Best Regards, Sven Efftinge

So, to conclude:

• (as bjz mentioned) it's quite coupled with an Eclipse environment
• critical features are missing

Nevertheless, they seem to be working on them. There is also, a What's next Section

Fulvia

As of Xtend 2.3, all of these issues are solved. See eclipse.org/xtend/documentation/index.html and kthoms.wordpress.com/2011/12/08/…. Of course the IDE experience is best when using Eclipse. – Janycejanyte

The link to "What's next" is invalid... – Hogshead

Answer 2

Since version 2.2 - The Eclipse Xtend Language ( released December 2011 ) now ships with support for both the Apache Ant and Apache Maven build tools.

With the additional of this support, a major drawback of not being about to use Xtend in your continuous integration/build process has been resolved.

Whislt official/native IDE support is still limited to the Eclipse IDE, both IntelliJ IDEA from Jetbrains and Netbeans from Oracle offer excellent Maven support which will assist development until IDE specific support is developed.

Wrecker

Answer 3

I haven't tried out Xtend extensively, but I did come across this article last week, and I found very enlightening:

Tight coupling with eclipse tooling

Xtend and Xtext are doubtlessly eclipse technologies through and through. This is a definite advantage for starting to use these technologies since they offer nice integration with the eclipse IDE. As a downside, however, code written in the Xtend language might be difficult to use with other tools apart from eclipse. On the other hand, the Java code generated by Xtend is vanilla Java code (apart from the lightweight Xtend library used in the generated code). This code, of course, can be used by most other tools. Therefore, I have chosen above to place the xtend source files not in the main Java source code folder of the project (src/main/java) but into a separate folder (src/main/xtext). This enabled to let Java code be generated into the src/main/java folder. From there, it can be picked up and used by other tools such as Maven.

In places, insufficient documentation

The documentation available for Xtend is far from extensive. In comparison, the documentation available for Groovy is extensive including books and various web sites.

EDIT: Xtend now has a standalone compiler, but they still seem to be pushing the Eclipse integration. Which is completely fine by mean, but it does mean that you won't have as great of an experience in other IDEs. Check out their site to see their future plans.

Aluino

Note that the compiler is not bound to Eclipse at all. We just haven't provided an API (e.g. Maven pug in) to use it without Eclipse. We are working on it : eclipse.org/Xtext/xtend/#whatsnext – Danit

This is no longer true. Xtend now has a standalone compiler. – Flatware