Compiling language definitions

Abstract

The ASF+SDF Meta-Environment is an interactive language development environment whose main application areas are definition of domain-specific languages, generation of program analysis and transformation tools, production of software renovation tools, and general specification and prototyping. It uses conditional rewrite rules to define the dynamic semantics and other tooloriented aspects of languages, so the effectiveness of the generated tools is critically dependent on the quality of the rewrite rule implementation.The ASF+SDF rewrite rule compiler generates C code, thus taking advantage of C's portability and the sophisticated optimization capabilities of current C compilers as well as avoiding potential abstract machine interface bottlenecks. It can handle large (10 000+ rule) language definitions and uses an efficient run-time storage scheme capable of handling large (1 000 000+ node) terms. Term storage uses maximal subterm sharing (hash-consing), which turns out to be more effective in the case of ASF+SDF than in Lisp or SML. Extensive benchmarking has shown the time and space performance of the generated code to be as good as or better than that of the best current rewrite rule and functional language compilers.

The Solid* toolset for software visual analytics of program structure and metrics comprehension: From research prototype to product

“…Static analyzers can be divided into lightweight ones, which use a subset of the target language grammar and semantics and trade fact completeness and accuracy for speed and simplicity; and heavyweight ones, which do full syntactic and semantic analysis at higher cost. Well-known static analyzers include LLVM [9], ROSE [10], Cppx [11], Columbus [12], Eclipse CDT [13], and Elsa [14] (for C/C++), Recoder [15] (for Java), and ASF+SDF (a metaframework with language-specific front-ends) [16]. Metric tools include CodeCrawler [17], Understand [18], and Visual Studio Team System (VSTS).…”

Marco: Safe, Expressive Macros for Any Language

“…For instance, MS 2 implements a C grammar [26], metafront implements grammars for Java and HTML [3], and Ur implements grammars for HTML and SQL [4]. These macro systems approach the level of complexity of extensible compiler toolkits such as ASF+SDF [25], Polyglot [18], or xtc [8,10]. While the approach of implementing a grammar works well enough for targeted language extensions and small domain-specific languages, it is problematic for large, existing languages.…”

WebDSL: A Case Study in Domain-Specific Language Engineering

“…Rewriting languages -ASF+SDF [97] is a compiled language based on first-order term rewriting with traversal functions, providing concrete syntax for patterns in rules. -TXL [31] is an interpreted, rule-based functional language with concrete syntax patterns, and a form of deep application of rules.…”