Supporting new languages

Supporting a new language in SonarQube involves six steps.

The steps to cover a new programming language are:

1. Write the grammar. This is the hardest part.

2. Write a parser (a parser simply parses an input based on your grammar to yield a parse tree).

3. Test your grammar, to ensure it is able to parse real-life language files.

4. Write a few parse tree visitors. Some visitors will compute metrics such as Executable lines, while others will enforce Adding coding rules. A dozen or so visitors are sufficient for an initial release.

5. Write a scanner Sensor, in a SonarQube Server plugin, to launch the visitors.

6. Compute

   1. issues

   2. raw measures

   3. code duplications

   4. syntax highlighting

   5. symbol table

   6. coverage information (lines/branches to cover, line/branch hits)

In fulfilling these steps, the SonarSource Language Recognizer (SSLR) can be an important resource.