OMAR for VS Code

Syntax highlighting, compilation, and a topology diagram for the OMAR language.

What it does

Highlights .omar files. Teams and their agents, ports and timers, prompt triggers and effects, connections and their delays, main blocks and the teams they instantiate. $(port) inside a prompt body is marked as the interpolation it is rather than as more string.

Compiles with omarc. OMAR: Compile to bytecode writes the bytecode beside the source. On save, the same compile runs to report problems as diagnostics — the real compiler, so nothing passes here and is refused later.

Draws the topology. OMAR: Show topology diagram opens a panel beside the editor showing what the program describes: ports, timers, reactions, and the edges between them. Save and it redraws.

Point omar.diagramServerUrl at a running diagram server and the same panel follows the run — which reaction is working, what each port carries, where logical time has reached. Without one it keeps showing the compiled topology, which is the honest thing: the program exists, it just is not running.

omar run program.omar --input request=hello --diagram-server --diagram-address 127.0.0.1:7341

Settings

Setting	Default
omar.compilerPath	omarc	Resolved on PATH when it is a bare name.
omar.diagramServerUrl	(none)	e.g. http://127.0.0.1:7341.
omar.compileOnSave	true	Report problems as diagnostics on save.

Diagnostics are positioned by guessing

omarc reports <path>: <message> and nothing else — no line, no column. So a diagnostic's position is recovered from the message: most of them name the thing they are complaining about in quotes, and that name is looked for in the source. A qualified name like flow.topic is tried by its last segment too, because that is what the source says inside the team that declares it.

It is a guess. When there is nothing to find, the first line carries the message, which is at least honest about not knowing. Positions in the compiler's output would make this exact, and that is where the fix belongs.

Building it

npm install
npm run build
npm test          # skips the compiler tests when omarc is not built
npm run lint

Press F5 in VS Code to launch a window with the extension loaded, and open examples/Review.omar.

The tests that use the real compiler find it at ../omar/lang/.lake/build/bin/omarc or wherever OMARC_BIN points, and skip themselves when it is not there. CI runs them in a job of their own, because checking how the compiler's errors are parsed against strings written here is not the same as checking it against the compiler.

Not yet

• No language server. No completion, no go-to-definition, no hover. The compiler knows the whole topology, so all three are reachable, but they want a server rather than a compile-per-save.
• The diagram does not nest. Containers are in the model; the drawing lays everything out in one plane, so a program that instantiates teams inside teams is drawn flat.
• No formatter.