Ismael: Yes, I guess rename (all kinds of renames) will be next, as a part of my master’s thesis, which starts in February.

Mohamed: Yes, the file needs to be compiled so I have an AST to work with. The result of a refactoring will be a bunch of “changes” (like a patch). This can then be previewed and applied by the user in the IDE.

Thank you for the reference, sounds interesting, I’ll take a look at it. There’s also the ASTGen project http://mir.cs.illinois.edu/astgen/ that generates ASTs to test refactorings, that might also be helpful.

upon reading

Max Schäfer, Mathieu Verbaere, Torbjörn Ekman, Oege de Moor. Stepping Stones over the Refactoring Rubicon — Lightweight Language Extensions to Easily Realise Refactorings. European Conference on Object-Oriented programming, ECOOP 2009.

I stumbled across this

“We would like to thank …and Dmitry Jemerov of JetBrains, who graciously gave us access to IntelliJ’s test suite.”

maybe that would be of great use to you and the Scala plug-in. I presume that it should be available, since they’ve open sourced their code.

If you decide to ask, it’d great to tell us the outcome.

could you please clarify these points for me.

how exactly is this going to be integrated with any of the Scala plug-ins for the various IDEs. my understanding is that you’ll first have to compile the source file with scalac to get the resulting refactored file.

seeing the ‘after state’ of the transformation. will this be possible? many of the current refactorings allow me preview the resulting file(s).

i’ve just started playing about with compiler plug-ins so my knowledge is limited.

also, i agree with Ismeal — rename would be a good choice — and, all the best with your report.

Very nice. Extract method is one of the refactorings I use the most, so good choice. Have you thought about which you will attempt next? I think rename would be very nice (even if just local rename to start with).

Best,
Ismael

Congrats on your achievement, looking forward to the report and the actual plugin.