Domain-Specific Languages (DSL’s) offer language-level abstractions that General-purpose languages do not offer, thus speeding up the implementation of the solution of problems within a specific domain. Developers have the choice of developing a DSL by building an interpreter/compiler for it, which is a hard and time-consuming task, or embedding it in a host language, thus speeding up the development process but losing several advantages that having a dedicated compiler might bring. In this work we present a meta-compiler called Metacasanova, whose meta-language is based on operational semantics. We then propose a language extension with functors and modules that allows to embed the type system of a language definition inside the meta-type system of Metacasanova and improves the performance of manipulating data structures at run-time. Our result shows that Metacasanova drastically reduces the code lines required to develop a compiler, and that the running time of the Metaprogram is improved by embedding the host Language type system in the meta-type system with the use of functors in the meta-language.

Metacasanova: an optimized meta-compiler for Domain-Specific Languages

DI GIACOMO, FRANCESCO;ABBADI, MOHAMED;CORTESI, Agostino;MAGGIORE, GIUSEPPE
2017-01-01

Abstract

Domain-Specific Languages (DSL’s) offer language-level abstractions that General-purpose languages do not offer, thus speeding up the implementation of the solution of problems within a specific domain. Developers have the choice of developing a DSL by building an interpreter/compiler for it, which is a hard and time-consuming task, or embedding it in a host language, thus speeding up the development process but losing several advantages that having a dedicated compiler might bring. In this work we present a meta-compiler called Metacasanova, whose meta-language is based on operational semantics. We then propose a language extension with functors and modules that allows to embed the type system of a language definition inside the meta-type system of Metacasanova and improves the performance of manipulating data structures at run-time. Our result shows that Metacasanova drastically reduces the code lines required to develop a compiler, and that the running time of the Metaprogram is improved by embedding the host Language type system in the meta-type system with the use of functors in the meta-language.
2017
Proceedings of the 10th ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Software Language Engineering
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Utilizza questo identificativo per citare o creare un link a questo documento: https://hdl.handle.net/10278/3690432
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