Paul Klint, Tijs van der Storm, Jurgen J. Vinju. On the impact of DSL tools on the maintainability of language implementations. In Claus Brabrand, Pierre-Etienne Moreau, editors, Proceedings of the of the Tenth Workshop on Language Descriptions, Tools and Applications, LDTA 2010, Paphos, Cyprus, March 28-29, 2010 - satellite event of ETAPS. pages 10, ACM, 2010. [doi]
The current rise of DSLs is often attributed to the existence of modern DSL tools that help to mitigate cost of ownership. Our main research goal is to investi- gate that non-trivial hypothesis. We present empirical results on the maintainability of six implementations of the same Domain Specific Language (DSL) using different languages (Java, JavaScript, C#) and DSL tools (ANTLR, OMeta, “M”). Our evaluation largely confirms that the maintainability of DSL implementations is higher when con- structed using DSL tools.