The first alpha release of Boo Lang Studio is available on CodePlex. This Visual Studio add-on strives to offer first class IDE support for Boo, a relatively new .NET language that while inspired by Python, is statically typed.
Since trying to offer a meaningful description of any language in a couple of lines is impossible, we instead offer a link to the Boo Manifesto. Of particular interest is the way it handles late binding, more commonly known today as "duck typing". Unlike most languages that either always or never use late binding, Boo allows developers to declare specific variables as late bound. Another feature rarely found in production languages is an extensible compiler pipeline.
An extensible syntax is only part of what I wanted. The compiler, the compilation process itself should be extensible. Programmers should be able to introduce new actions where appropriate to execute and automate a variety of tasks such as producing documentation and reports, checking coding conventions, applying program transformations to better support debugging or specific execution environments just to cite a few. Programmers should also be able to reuse and/or replace specific compiler components such as the source code parser.
The first alpha release of Boo Lang Studio includes the following enhancements over the earlier prototypes:
- 64-bit compatibility
- Partial Intellisense
- Project property pages
- Debugger breakpoints
- Improved syntax colorization