Library Writers Guide

I'm guessing the Library Writer's Guide is for people who want to write libraries?

Yes, that's right.

Is that a common thing to do?

No, actually it's quite rare. You might consider it if you had lots of VDM different specifications that had a common core of functions. Or you might consider writing a VDM library to call a specialised native Java library, so that other VDM writers can access it too. The guide has some more examples of things you can do with libraries.

Is it difficult to write a library?

No, not at all. You have to write functions or operations in a particular way in Java and then match those in VDM using is not yet specified as the body. If you want a library to be used by VSCode, you need to also include a META-INF file in a particular format. But that's all.

And the standard libraries are the same?

Yes, exactly. So you can look at how they're written as a good example. The document just brings it all together. It isn't very large.

Then to use them, you just put them on the classpath, like annotations?

Exactly. It's easy!

Okay, thanks for that.