Cross-IDE remote debugging of model management programs through the Debug Adapter Protocol

Eclipse Epsilon is an open-source family of model management languages and tools, which has seen significant use in industry and academia. Epsilon programs have been used in a variety of scenarios, from being simply run in the Eclipse IDE, to being embedded in Eclipse plugins, Java programs, web services, Ant workflows, and Gradle build scripts. When one of these embedded Epsilon programs showed unexpected behaviour, debugging it required running it from the Eclipse IDE: reproducing the behaviour was complicated if it also required recreating a complex environment. Likewise, users asked for supporting debugging from other IDEs beside Eclipse, as its market share has dropped in the last years. In this demo, we will show a new feature in Epsilon 2.6 which allows for remote debugging of Epsilon programs in a broader range of scenarios, using the Microsoft Debug Adapter Protocol. We will also demonstrate how this remote debugging support can be reused from other IDEs (specifically, Microsoft Visual Studio Code), with minimal effort compared to re-implementing a dedicated debugger.