Dedicated support for analyses and optimizations in language workbenches

Abstract

Language workbenches are widely used to implement domain-specific languages (DSLs) and their accompanying integrated development environments (IDEs). They help to define the abstract syntax, concrete syntax(es), type system, and transformations for the languages. However, there are other language aspects, specifically program analyses and optimizations, that are also crucial to a language implementation, but state-of-the-art language workbenches has only limited support for them. The high implementation effort for these language aspects is justifiable for a general-purpose language (GPL), but is not justifiable for DSLs because of their different development economies. To this end, I conduct research on dedicated support for analyses and optimizations for DSLs in language workbenches. My main goal is to develop declarative meta-languages that help to define static program analyses and that capture and automate patterns and techniques of optimizations. The research directions are directly driven by industrial need, and upon successful completion, the results would be applied in projects centered around DSLs for high-performance computing (HPC), insurance, and concurrent embedded systems.