Tag Archives: Compilers

07/09/2016 – Talk by Francesco di Giacomo

Title:  Building Domain Specific Languages with the Metacasanova meta-compiler
Time: 14:00
Location: Meeting room
Type: Research Result
Speaker: Francesco di Giacomo
Abstract: main specific languages (DSL’s) are becoming more popular thanks to their ability to provide abstractions that are not part of general purpose languages that ease the development process in specific scenarios, ranging from video games to web development.
Creating a new DSL requires to build a compiler for it, which is a very complex piece of software. This complexity usually causes two problems: (i) the development of the compiler itself requires a significant amount of manpower, and (ii) adding new features to the language may become problematic. In this talk we propose a different approach to writing a hard-coded compiler by using a meta-compiler, i.e. a software that takes as an input the language definition and a program written in that language, and outputs a corresponding executable code. We show the advantages of this approach in terms of simplicity of design and coding requirements, and we present a performance analysis on the generated code for Casanova 2, a DSL for game software development.