Toward a Multi-Language and Multi-Environment Framework for Live Programming

While applications of live programming are expanding to more practical and professional domains, most live programming environments (LPEs) are still developed for a single target language with an original code editor. We propose an implementation framework for developing LPEs so that we can minimize efforts on implementing an LPE for a different target language and an existing code editor/IDE. Our idea is to use a meta-JIT language implementation framework (e.g., Graal/Truffle and RPython) and LSP to separate core live programming implementations from language-specific and editor/IDE specific implementations. This paper takes the Kanon live programming environment as a concrete example and discusses how we can design the framework to accommodate the features of Kanon. Although the framework design is still underway, the paper presents a sketch of the framework APIs for separating language-specific functions and clarifies the requirements to LSP.