Automated DSL Construction Based on Software Product Lines

DSL (Domain-Specific Language) is one of the important approaches for software abstraction. In the past decades, DSLs have been provided by expert engineers familiar with domain knowledge and programming language processors. It is not easy for ordinary programmers to construct DSLs for their own purposes. To deal with this problem, we propose a language workbench called Argyle that can automatically generate a DSL by only specifying a set of functions needed to the DSL and an execution platform supported by the DSL. Argyle is based on software product lines and consists of the following two steps: 1) development of the core assets for constructing a family of DSLs and 2) DSL configuration using these core assets. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, we developed a prototype DSL for supporting MSR (Mining Software Repositories), the most active research field in software engineering.