[notacoward]

> It's a great time to create language tools.

Absolutely. In fact, after I wrote that comment I started thinking about what could be done to make this easier. Language servers help a lot with some parts. Linters and checkers might be able to use something like that, if you're transpiling. Run standard tools on the target form, but with ways to tie results back to the original source. If we stick to a transpiling model, CI/CD integration might also be eased with a generic DSL adapter that just needs to know extensions and target language. It's now on my list of "maybe some time" projects now that I have a lot of spare time, but TBH it's not high in that list so I doubt I'll get to it.

[m-hilgendorf]

I have my own ideas about making CI/CD for DSLs easier. I don't think transpiling is necessarily the right approach, since not every language has a valid transpilation targe (here's my bias showing - consider a hardware description language, there can't really be a transpilation target).

One of the problems in designing generic tools for language development is they have to be far more abstract than the author might realize at first. The notion of evaluation is a big one, as in what it means to evaluate a chunk of code, what its results are, its intermediate products, and when the evaluation takes place (is it compile time, run time, parse time, etc). I think the next generation of tools are going to inspect these subtleties a lot more than traditional tools, since it has a big impact on usage when languages have heavy macro or other compile/parse time evaluation.