How do I go about creating a compiler/editor in Eclipse?

Question

My question is somewhat specific, but the answer I need is general:

(turned out very wordy, so boldened the important bit)

I have to use a light-weight proprietary language to code in at work, which only has a basic text editor with syntax highlights.

Because I need to do a lot of testing, I want to create an Eclipse plug-in for the language so that I can use the in-built debugging and step through the program. I've found a few interesting sites that detail how to add support for your own language, but I'm new at this and don't know how much work it would take or how much support I would get from the Eclipse tools.

Can anyone tell me if I would get full use of the Eclipse debugging tools (providing I am given access to the full language grammar) if I added support for this language, or am I wasting my time?

Edit: sites I found were all like this one

Answer 1

A good starting point to get a parser, editor, outline view and content assistant for your language would probably be Xtext. Writing your own debugger is quite a different story, and described in this article.

Answer 2

As far as I know the ecplise CDT, which provides the C/C++ support can be used as a base for other languages too. This limits the amount of programming you do esp if most of the language tools are command line driven. If the language has a text mode debugger like gdb then adding a new mapping with the cdt debugging infrastructure would probably be the most straight forward way to implement debugging.

Also see Photran, a fortran environment based on cdt.