What are the main differences between Jetbrains' MPS and Eclipse Xtext?

Question

I have used Eclipse Xtext in several projects. I loved the ease of defining a grammar over an Ecore (meta)model and letting everything generated for you including awesome Ec

Answer 1

In my opinion Jetbrain's MPS is easier to learn at first. You don't need to work with configuration files like the Workflow-Files in xtext.

A main difference is that in MPS you edit the model directly and this model is shown to you in a syntax/editor view. In xtext you edit the syntax and the model is generated/parsed.

In my opinion MPS is more powerful. You can combine languages much easier and extend them. A big advantage of projectional editors is that you can hide information or show additional information retrieved from the model. You can also used different views like tables or graphs (coming up in MPS 2.1).

Version control can be done with MPS. Theres a merge/diff tool that works on the tree-model.