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Injecting Language Workbench Technology into Mainstream Languages

Authors Michael Ballantyne, Matthias Felleisen

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Author Details

Michael Ballantyne
  • PLT at Northeastern University, Boston, MA, USA
Matthias Felleisen
  • PLT at Northeastern University, Boston, MA, USA

Funding

This work was partially supported by NSF grants SHF 2007686 and 1823244.

Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful for technical feedback from Michael Delmonaco, Siddhartha Kasivajhula, and Alexis King. Also thanks to William Byrd and Siddhartha Kasivajhula for helpful comments on early drafts, and to Shriram Krishnamurthi and Ryan Culpepper for rubbing Matthias’s nose in Spoofax and language workbench ideas.

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Michael Ballantyne and Matthias Felleisen. Injecting Language Workbench Technology into Mainstream Languages. In Eelco Visser Commemorative Symposium (EVCS 2023). Open Access Series in Informatics (OASIcs), Volume 109, pp. 3:1-3:11, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2023) https://doi.org/10.4230/OASIcs.EVCS.2023.3

Abstract

Eelco Visser envisioned a future where DSLs become a commonplace abstraction in software development. He took strides towards implementing this vision with the Spoofax language workbench. However, his vision is far from the mainstream of programming today. How will the many mainstream programmers encounter and adopt language workbench technology? We propose that the macro systems found in emerging industrial languages open a path towards delivering language workbenches as easy-to-adopt libraries. To develop the idea, we sketch an implementation of a language workbench as a macro-library atop Racket and identify the key features of the macro system needed to enable this evolution path.

Subject Classification

ACM Subject Classification
  • Software and its engineering → Macro languages
  • Software and its engineering → Domain specific languages
  • Software and its engineering → Development frameworks and environments
Keywords
  • Language workbenches
  • macro systems
  • language adoption

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Supplementary Materials

References

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