What is EMF4CPP

What is EMF4CPP

EMF4CPP (formerly Ecore2CPP) is a C++ implementation and type mapping for the Eclipse Modeling Framework (EMF) core, the Ecore metamodel.

The current release allows to generate C++ code from Ecore metamodels, and to parse and serialize models and metamodels from and into XMI documents. Also, a partially implemented reflective API for generated metamodels is provided.

EMF4CPP consists of two parts: a source code generator from Ecore metamodels to C++ and two runtime support libraries. One of the runtime support libraries implements the Ecore metamodel (libemf4cpp-ecore). The other one allows to parse and serialize modeles in XMI format (libemf4cpp-ecorecpp). The generator is currently implemented using Xpand and Xtend.

This is our first step at providing a set of tools for MDD (Model-Driven Development) in C++ as an alternative to the Java world offered by Eclipse tools. We would like to explore common C++ idioms, paradigms and tools (such as template metaprogramming or Boost.Spirit) to provide tools for managing models, writing Domain-Specific Languages (DSLs), and Model-to-Text (M2T), Model-to-Model (M2M), and Text-to-Model (T2M) transformations.

Two direct advantages can be that C++ programmers can write their data model using Ecore and the Eclipse tools to finally generate code with EMF4CPP, and also, memory consumption and efficiency is usually better in EMF4CPP than in Java, as our preliminary results show.