An Evaluation of Domain-Specific Language Technologies for Code Generation

Abstract

Software systems are becoming increasingly complex, requiring a deep knowledge to work and program with them. This is especially true for simulation frameworks used by scientists and engineers, but also applies to completely different domains such as mobile or web applications. To ease working with these systems, domain-specific languages (DSLs) are a convenient way to enable domain experts describe settings and problems they want to solve using terms familiar to them. Building upon this specification in the DSL, a compiler transform this to the target software framework, e.,g., runnable program code. To write such a compiler, a solid implementation framework is needed. In this paper, we propose criteria for the evaluation of textual programming language implementation frameworks to which we accordingly evaluate four technologies, namely Spoofax/IMP, Rascal MPL, a custom approach using C++ and a custom approach using Scala.