Neon: A Library for Language Usage Analysis

A language is ultimately developed for its users: the programmers. The gap between the language experts who design and implement the language and its associated tools and the programmers can be very large, particularly in areas where the language is developed to be used by non-programmers or novice programmers by design. To verify that assumptions made and beliefs held by the language developers about the actual use made by programmers bear out, some analyis of the usage of the language and its associated tools must be performed, preferably in an automated fashion transparent to the users. In this paper we detail our approach, which is essentially to log compilations in order to obtain compilation histories and to query these compilation histories in order to extract the necessary information. For the latter task, we have designed and implemented the Neon library, and show how relatively complicated queries can be formulated effectively.