Development Of Domain-specific Languages Research Articles

When and how to develop domain-specific languages

Domain-specific languages (DSLs) are languages tailored to a specific application domain. They offer substantial gains in expressiveness and ease of use compared with general-purpose programming languages in their domain of application. DSL development is hard, requiring both domain knowledge and language development expertise. Few people have both. Not surprisingly, the decision to develop a DSL is often postponed indefinitely, if considered at all, and most DSLs never get beyond the application library stage.Although many articles have been written on the development of particular DSLs, there is very limited literature on DSL development methodologies and many questions remain regarding when and how to develop a DSL. To aid the DSL developer, we identify patterns in the decision, analysis, design, and implementation phases of DSL development. Our patterns improve and extend earlier work on DSL design patterns. We also discuss domain analysis tools and language development systems that may help to speed up DSL development. Finally, we present a number of open problems.

Kodak optical-gaging projector : American Machinist, Vol. 95. No. 12

Domain-specific languages (DSLs) become more useful the more specific they are to a particular domain. The resulting need for developing a substantial number of DSLs can only be satisfied if DSL development can be made as efficient as possible. One way in which to address this challenge is by enabling the reuse of (partial) DSLs in the construction of new DSLs. Reuse of DSLs builds on two foundations: a notion of DSL composition and theoretical results ensuring the safeness of composing DSLs with respect to the semantics of the component DSLs.Given a graph-grammar formalisation of DSLs, in this paper, we build on graph transformation system morphisms to define parameterised DSLs and their instantiation by an amalgamation construction. Results on the protection of the behaviour along the induced morphisms allow us to safely reuse and combine definitions of DSLs to build more complex ones. We illustrate our proposal in e-Motions for a DSL for production-line systems and three independent DSLs for describing non-functional properties, namely response time, throughput, and failure rate.