Domain-Specific Language Techniques for Visual Computing: A Comprehensive Study

As a part of domain-specific development, Domain-Specific Language (DSL) is widely used in both the academia and industry to solve different aspects of the problems in engineering. A DSL is a customized language whose expressiveness is tailored to a well-defined application domain, so as to offer an effective interface for the domain experts. To mitigate the programming complexity of the General-Purpose Programming Languages, and meanwhile maintain the precise expression towards some exact engineering domains, DSLs present a higher level of abstraction than low-level interfaces, while providing much more flexibility than high-level interfaces. Nevertheless, it lacks a survey to have a systematic overview of the essential commonalities shared by those works. In this survey, we take a brand-new perspective, to categorize the state-of-the-art works into different categories, tailored to three fundamental implementation concerns of DSLs: abstract syntax, concrete syntax, and semantics. Specifically, they are characterized according to their parsing and mapping strategy (external/internal) between the abstract syntax and concrete syntax, the mapping results (textual/graphical symbols), and also the functions they emphasize (modeling, visualizing, etc.). Integrated with the literature, we finally summarized the research overview of DSLs.