Integrating Interactive Programming Systems with Modern IDEs : A VS Code Integration of Storm

Sammanfattning

Storm is an interactive programming system built around extensible languages, run-time reflection, and compiler-driven feedback. These properties make conventional editorsupport difficult, since a plugin cannot reliably hard-code syntactic and semantic informa-tion. Instead, the editor must query Storm for information such as semantic highlighting,diagnostics, documentation, and executable entities.This thesis presents the design, implementation, and evaluation of a Visual Studio Codeextension for Storm. The extension connects VS Code to Storm’s custom binary languageserver protocol using a hybrid architecture consisting of a TypeScript-based VS Code fron-tend and a native C++ adapter for protocol encoding and decoding. The implementedextension provides semantic highlighting, diagnostics, documentation lookup, and codeexecution.The system was evaluated through semantic color request latency measurements and asmall-scale user study on perceived responsiveness. The latency measurements show thatthe VS Code integration achieved low round-trip times in the tested environment, withlower median times than the existing Emacs integration for larger files. The user studyindicates that perceived responsiveness is not determined only by the shortest possibledelay: while the 100 ms configuration was perceived as fast, the 300 ms configuration waspreferred more often for overall stability and programming suitability.The thesis concludes that integrating Storm into a modern IDE is feasible, but thatpreserving the qualities of an interactive programming system requires careful handling ofprotocol translation, editor synchronization, semantic token caching, and debounce-basedfeedback control.