Question

What’s the recommended way of getting Scala IDE for Eclipse to reference the scala-compiler.jar?

I encountered this issue while trying to develop a custom DSL that gets translated into Scala at runtime.

Using Scala parser combinators has been a sheer pleasure so far.

So now I have some generated Scala code that I need to compile and run. Scala supports this through the scala.tools.nsc.* package set.

However, the scala.tools.nsc package is not part of scala-library.jar, but rather a part of scala-compiler.jar.

As far as I can tell, the scala-compiler.jar is not installed as part of the bundle of Scala IDE for Eclipse (though it is part of the plug in), and I can’t find any simple way to add support for it.

The only way around this seems to be manually adding a reference to the compiler jar, either from the Eclipse plugin directory or from a version downloaded directly from the web. Even if that works, however, it seems like a great way to run into problems down the road.

So, what’s the best way to do this?

Cheers,
Or

Answer 1

You’re right that it’s best to manually add the dependency rather than use the one that is bundled with Eclipse. If you’re not using one already, look at a build system which does dependency resolution such as maven or ivy, or more in the Scala vein, sbt.

If you’re not developing a plugin, then just use the normal dependency resolution in maven, or ivy or whatever. This is what you need for maven:

<dependency>
    <groupId>org.scala-lang</groupId>
    <artifactId>scala-compiler</artifactId>
    <version>2.9.1</version>
</dependency>

If you are developing a plugin, then you can use a similar dependency resolution, but if you’re using maven, you’ll probably want to look at Tycho.