2.9 of Xtext and Xtend comes with many bugfixes, performance improvements and new features.
The most noteworthy change is the tooling support for additional platforms. Much of the tooling services, that Xtext for languages will be available in a platform independent manner. In addition version 2.9 comes with out-of-the box support for web-editors, such as Eclipse Orion and Ace, as well as plug-ins for Jetbrain's IntelliJ IDEA. More noteworthy features are a whole nw generator infrastructure that supports different project layouts and an incremental compilers including gradle support.