A Survey on LLM-based Code Generation for Low-Resource and Domain-Specific Programming Languages

Abstract

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities in code generation for popular programming languages. However, their performance in Low-Resource Programming Languages (LRPLs) and Domain-Specific Languages (DSLs) remains a critical challenge. This gap affects millions of developers - with Rust alone having 3.5 million users - who are currently unable to fully leverage LLM capabilities. LRPLs and DSLs face unique challenges, including severe data scarcity and, for DSLs, highly specialized syntax and semantics that are poorly represented in general-purpose datasets. Addressing these challenges is crucial as LRPLs and DSLs significantly enhance development efficiency in specialized domains and applications, including financial and scientific works. While several surveys on LLMs for software engineering and code exist, none comprehensively address the challenges and opportunities specific to LRPLs and DSLs. Our survey fills this gap by providing a systematic review of the current state, methodologies, and challenges in leveraging LLMs for code generation in LRPL and DSL. We filtered 111 papers from over 27,000 published studies from 2020 – 2024 to understand the capabilities and limitations of LLMs in these specialized domains. We also expanded our literature search to include 5 recent papers from 2024 – 2025. We report LLMs used, benchmarks, and metrics to evaluate code generation in LRPLs and DSLs, as well as strategies used to enhance LLM performance, and the collected datasets and curation methods in this context. We identified four main evaluation techniques used in the literature, along with several metrics to assess code generation in LRPL and DSL. We categorized the methods used for LLM improvement into six main groups and summarized the novel methods and architectures proposed by the researchers. We also classified different approaches used for data collection and preparation. While different techniques, metrics, and datasets are used, there is a lack of a standard approach and a benchmark dataset to evaluate code generation in several LRPLs and DSLs. We discuss several distinctions of the studied approaches with the ones used in high-resource programming languages (HRPLs), as well as several challenges unique to these languages, especially DSLs. The challenges stem from the scarcity of data, the unique requirements, and specialized domains, which often need expertise guidelines or domain-specific tools. Accordingly, we provide insights into different research opportunities for the studied aspects. This survey serves as a comprehensive resource for researchers and practitioners working at the intersection of LLMs, software engineering, and specialized programming languages, providing a foundation for future advancements in LRPL and DSL code generation. A GitHub repository was created to organize the papers of this survey at https://github.com/jie-jw-wu/Survey-CodeLLM4LowResource-DSL .