Towards a Meta-Language for the Concurrency Concern in DSLs

Abstract

Concurrency is of primary interest in the development of complex software-intensive systems, as well as the deployment on modern platforms. Furthermore, Domain-Specific Languages (DSLs) are increasingly used in industrial processes to separate and abstract the various concerns of complex systems. However, reifying the definition of the DSL concurrency remains a challenge. This not only prevents leveraging the concurrency concern of a particular domain or platform, but it also hinders: a) the development of a complete understanding of the DSL semantics; b) the effectiveness of concurrency-aware analysis techniques; c) the analysis of the deployment on parallel architectures. In this paper, we introduce the key ideas leading toward MoCCML, a dedicated meta-language for formally specifying the concurrency concern within the definition of a DSL. The concurrency constraints can reflect the knowledge in a particular domain, but also the constraints of a particular platform. MoCCML comes with a complete language workbench to help a DSL designer in the definition of the concurrency directly within the concepts of the DSL itself, and a generic workbench to simulate and analyze any model conforming to this DSL. MoCCML is illustrated on the definition of an lightweight extension of SDF (Synchronous Data Flow [1]).