https://hal.inria.fr/hal-00767175/document

FAMILIAR: A domain-specific language for large scale management of feature models

Diversity is prevalent in modern software systems to facilitate adapting the software to customer requirements or the execution environment. Diversity has an impact on all phases of the software development process. Appropriate means and organizational structures are required to deal with the additional complexity introduced by software variability. This introductory article to the special section "Software Diversity--Modeling, Analysis and Evolution" provides an overview of the current state of the art in diverse systems development and discusses challenges and potential solutions. The article covers requirements analysis, design, implementation, verification and validation, maintenance and evolution as well as organizational aspects. It also provides an overview of the articles which are part of this special section and addresses particular issues of diverse systems development.

/pdf/software-diversity-state-of-the-art-and-perspectives-5fgo46rv0m.pdf

Software diversity: state of the art and perspectives

Data locality and parallelism are critical optimization objectives for performance on modern multi-core machines. Both coarse-grain parallelism (e.g., multi-core) and fine-grain parallelism (e.g., vector SIMD) must be effectively exploited, but despite decades of progress at both ends, current compiler optimization schemes that attempt to address data locality and both kinds of parallelism often fail at one of the three objectives.We address this problem by proposing a 3-step framework, which aims for integrated data locality, multi-core parallelism and SIMD execution of programs. We define the concept of vectorizable codelets, with properties tailored to achieve effective SIMD code generation for the codelets. We leverage the power of a modern high-level transformation framework to restructure a program to expose good ISA-independent vectorizable codelets, exploiting multi-dimensional data reuse. Then, we generate ISA-specific customized code for the codelets, using a collection of lower-level SIMD-focused optimizations.We demonstrate our approach on a collection of numerical kernels that we automatically tile, parallelize and vectorize, exhibiting significant performance improvements over existing compilers.

/pdf/when-polyhedral-transformations-meet-simd-code-generation-5apk0pu9ad.pdf

When polyhedral transformations meet SIMD code generation

Xtext is an open-source framework for implementing external, textual domain-specific languages (DSLs). So far, most DSLs implemented with Xtext and similar tools focus on structural aspects such as service specifications and entities. Because behavioral aspects are significantly more complicated to implement, they are often delegated to general-purpose programming languages. This approach introduces complex integration patterns and the DSL's high level of abstraction is compromised.We present Xbase as part of Xtext, an expression language that can be reused via language inheritance in any DSL implementation based on Xtext. Xbase expressions provide both control structures and program expressions in a uniform way. Xbase is statically typed and tightly integrated with the Java type system. Languages extending Xbase inherit the syntax of a Java-like expression language as well as language infrastructure components, including a parser, an unparser, a linker, a compiler and an interpreter. Furthermore, the framework provides integration into the Eclipse IDE including debug and refactoring support.The application of Xbase is presented by means of a domain model language which serves as a tutorial example and by the implementation of the programming language Xtend. Xtend is a functional and object-oriented general purpose language for the Java Virtual Machine (JVM). It is built on top of Xbase which is the reusable expression language that is the foundation of Xtend.

/pdf/xbase-implementing-domain-specific-languages-for-java-qe6yp8a28d.pdf

Xbase: implementing domain-specific languages for Java

The human work involved in data transformation represents a major bottleneck for today’s data-driven organizations. In response, we present Predictive Interaction, a framework for interactive systems that shifts the burden of technical specification from users to algorithms, while preserving human guidance and expressive power.

https://idl.cs.washington.edu/files/2015-PredictiveInteraction-CIDR.pdf

Predictive Interaction for Data Transformation

Computer science is undergoing a revolution today, in which language designers are shifting attention from general purpose programming languages to so-called domain-specific languages (DSLs). General-purpose languages like Java, C#, C++, and C have long been the primary focus of language research. The idea was to create one language that would be better suited for programming than any other language. Ironically, we now have so many different general purpose languages that it is hard to imagine how this goal could be attained. Instead of aiming to be the best for solving any kind of computing problem, DSLs aim to be particularly good for solving a specific class of problems, and in doing so they are often much more accessible to the general public than traditional programming languages.

W. Taha

Papers

Plenary talk III Domain-specific languages