Puzzle: A Tool for Analyzing and Extracting Specification Clones in DSLs

Méndez-Acuña, David; Galindo, José; Combemale, Benôıt; Blouin, Arnaud; Baudry, Benoît

doi:10.1007/978-3-319-35122-3_26

Cited by 3 publications

(1 citation statement)

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“…In a previous work [17,18] we introduced an approach to automatically infer a language modular design from a given set of DSL variants. In this article we extend that work to provide a complete reverse engineering technique that produces not only the language modular design, but the entire language product line.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Reverse engineering language product lines from existing DSL variants

Méndez-Acuña

Galindo

Combemale

et al. 2017

Journal of Systems and Software

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The use of domain-specific languages (DSLs) has become a successful technique to develop complex systems. In this context, an emerging phenomenon is the existence of DSL variants, which are different versions of a DSL adapted to specific purposes but that still share commonalities. In such a case, the challenge for language designers is to reuse, as much as possible, previously defined language constructs to narrow implementation from scratch. To overcome this challenge, recent research in software languages engineering introduced the the notion of language product lines. Similarly to software product lines, language product lines are often built from a set of existing DSL variants.In this article, we propose a reverse-engineering technique to ease-off such a development scenario. Our approach receives a set of DSL variants which are used to automatically recover a language modular design and to synthesize the corresponding variability models. The validation is performed in a project involving industrial partners that required three different variants of a DSL for finite state machines. This validation shows that our approach is able to correctly identify commonalities and variability.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Reverse engineering language product lines from existing DSL variants

Méndez-Acuña

Galindo

Combemale

et al. 2017

Journal of Systems and Software

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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Towards a recipe for language decomposition: quality assessment of language product lines

Cazzola

Favalli

2022

Empir Software Eng

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Programming languages are complex systems that are usually implemented as monolithic interpreters and compilers. In recent years, researchers and practitioners gained interest in product line engineering to improve the reusability of language assets and the management of variability-rich systems, introducing the notions of language workbenches and language product lines (LPLs). Nonetheless, language development remains a complex activity and design or implementation flaws can easily waste the efforts of decomposing a language specification into language features. Poorly designed language decompositions result in high inter-dependent components, reducing the variability space of the LPL system and its maintainability. One should detect and fix the design flaws posthaste to prevent these risks while minimizing the development overhead. Therefore, various aspects of the quality of a language decomposition should be quantitatively measurable through adequate metrics. The evaluation, analysis and feedback of these measures should be a primary part of the engineering process of a LPL. In this paper, we present an exploratory study trying to capture these aspects by introducing a design methodology for LPLs; we define the properties of a good language decomposition and adapt a set of metrics from the literature to the framework of language workbenches. Moreover, we leverage the LPL engineering environment to perform an empirical evaluation of 26 -based LPLs based on this design methodology. Our contributions form the foundations of a design methodology for -based LPLs. This methodology is comprised of four different elements: i) an engineering process that defines the order in which decisions are made, ii) an integrated development environment for LPL designers and iii) some best practices in the design of well-structured language decomposition when using , supported by iv) a variety of LPL metrics that can be used to detect errors in design decisions.

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