A preliminary study on various implementation approaches of domain-specific language

  • Authors:

  • Toma Kosar;Pablo E. Martınez López;Pablo A. Barrientos;Marjan Mernik

  • Affiliations:

  • University of Maribor, Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Smetanova ulica 17, 2000 Maribor, Slovenia;Universidad Nacional de La Plata, Facultad de Informática, LIFIA (1900) La Plata, Buenos Aires, Argentina;Universidad Nacional de La Plata, Facultad de Informática, LIFIA (1900) La Plata, Buenos Aires, Argentina;University of Maribor, Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Smetanova ulica 17, 2000 Maribor, Slovenia

  • Venue:
  • Information and Software Technology
  • Year:
  • 2008

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Abstract

Various implementation approaches for developing a domain-specific language are available in literature. There are certain common beliefs about the advantages/disadvantages of these approaches. However, it is hard to be objective and speak in favor of a particular one, since these implementation approaches are normally compared over diverse application domains. The purpose of this paper is to provide empirical results from ten diverse implementation approaches for domain-specific languages, but conducted using the same representative language. Comparison shows that these discussed approaches differ in terms of the effort need to implement them, however, the effort needed by a programmer to implement a domain-specific language should not be the only factor taken into consideration. Another important factor is the effort needed by an end-user to rapidly write correct programs using the produced domain-specific language. Therefore, this paper also provides empirical results on end-user productivity, which is measured as the lines of code needed to express a domain-specific program, similarity to the original notation, and how error-reporting and debugging are supported in a given implementation.