Metacasanova: an optimized meta-compiler for domain-specific languages

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. Then, we 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 results show that Metacasanova dramatically 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.CCS Concepts • Software and its engineering → Translator writing systems and compiler generators;

Languages of Games and Play

“…publication query publication type research category note [199] -w journal article proposal of solution [198] -w PhD thesis proposal of solution publication query publication type research category note [191] 76w conference paper proposal of solution [193] -w conference paper proposal of solution [192] -w journal article proposal of solution publication query publication type research category note [146] 47n workshop paper proposal of solution Casanova [147] 34w conference paper validation research Casanova [148] 95w conference paper proposal of solution Casanova [149] 308w conference paper validation research Casanova [68] 177n Master's thesis validation research Casanova [4] 60n conference paper proposal of solution Casanova II [3] 26n conference paper proposal of solution Casanova II [69] 53n conference paper proposal of solution Metacasanova [2] 195n PhD thesis validation research Casanova II [71] 101n conference paper validation research Metacasanova [70] 86n journal article validation research Casanova II PuzzleScript is an online textual puzzle game design language and interpreter 1 created by…”

“…Game scripts consist of the main script and pairs of event detection-and event response scripts. Abbadi et al[2, 3, 4] and di Giacomo et al[68,69,70,71] continue work on Casanova, in the context of optimized compilation, meta-programming and high performance encapsulation. Casanova 2 is available for Unity or stand-alone under the MIT license on GitHub1 .…”