A trick for speeding up Xtend building

I love Xtend and use it as much as possible. For code bases which are completely under my control, I use it for everything that’s not an interface or something that really needs to have inner classes and such.

As much as I love Xtend, the performance of the compilation (or “transpilation”) to Java source is not quite on the level of the JDK’s Java compiler. That’s quite impossible given the amount of effort that has gone into the Java compiler accumulated over the years and the fact that the team behind Xtend is only a few FTE (because they have to take care of Xtext as well). Nevertheless, things can get out of hand relatively quickly and leave you with a workspace which needs several minutes to fully build  and already tens of seconds for an incremental build, triggered by a change in one Xtend file.

This performance (or lack thereof) for incremental builds is usually caused by a lot of Xtend source  interdependencies. Xtend is an Xtext DSL and, as such, is aware of the fact that a change in on file can make it necessary for another file to be reconsidered for compilation as well. However, Xtend’s incremental build implementation is not (yet?) always capable of deciding when this is the case and when not, so it chooses to add all depending Xtend files to the build and so forth – a learned word for this is “transitive build behavior”.

A simple solution is to program against interfaces. You’ve probably already heard this as a best practice before and outside of the context of Xtend, so it already has merits outside of compiler performance. In essence, the trick is to extract a Java interface from an Xtend class, “demote” that Xtend class to an implementation of that interface and use dependency injection to inject an instance of the Xtend implementation class. This works because the Java interface “insulates” the implementation from its clients, so when you change the implementation, but not the interface, Xtend doesn’t trigger re-transpilation of Xtend client classes. Usually, only the Xtend implementation class is re-transpiled.

In the following I’ll assume that we’re running inside a Guice container, so that the Xtend class is never instantiated explicitly – this is typical for generators and model extensions, anyway. Perform the following steps:

1. Rename the Xtend class to reflect it’s the implementation class, by renaming both the file and the class declaration itself, without using the Rename Refactoring. This will break compilation for all the clients.
2. Find the transpiled Java class corresponding to the Xtend class in the xtend-gen/ folder. This is easiest through the Ctrl/Cmd-Shift-T (Open Type) short cut.
3. Invoke the Extract Interface Refactoring on that one and extract it into a Java interface in the same package, but with the original name of the Xtend class.
4. Have the Xtend implementation class implement the Java interface. Compilation should become unbroken at this point.
5. Add a Guice annotation to the Java interface:

   @com.google.inject.ImplementedBy(...class literal for the Xtext implementation class...)
   

Personally, I like to rename the Xtend implementation class to have the Impl postfix. If I have more Xtend classes together, I tend to bundle them up into a impl sub package.

Of course, every time the effective interface of the implementation class changes, you’ll have to adapt the corresponding interface as well – prompted by compilation errors popping up. I tend to apply this technique only as soon as the build times become a hindrance.