The design space of multi-language development environments

Non-trivial software systems integrate many artifacts expressed in multiple modeling and programming languages. However, even though these artifacts heavily depend on each other, existing development environments do not sufficiently support handling relations between artifacts in different languages. By means of a literature survey, tool prototyping, and experiments, we study the design space of multi-language development environments (MLDEs)-tools that consider cross-language relations as first artifacts. We ask: What is the state of the art in the MLDE space? What are the design choices and challenges faced by tool builders? To what extent are MLDEs desired by users, and what aspects of MLDEs are particularly helpful? Our main conclusions are that (a) cross-language relations are ubiquitous and troublesome in multi-language systems, (b) users highly appreciate cross-language support mechanisms of MLDEs, and (c) generic MLDEs clearly advance the state of the art in tooling for language integration. The technical artifacts resulting from this study include a feature model of the MLDE design space, a data set of harvested cross-language relations in a case study system (JTrac) and two MLDE prototypes, TexMo and Coral, that implement two radically different choices in the design space.