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

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Abstract

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.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the National Nature Science Foundation of China (NSFC) Grant Nos. 61702271 and 41971343, and Postgraduate Research & Practice Innovation Program of Jiangsu Province (No. SJCX20_0445). The authors would like to thank Ziqi Sha, Sitong Fang, Shunlong Ye, Guang Yang, and Ziyu Yao for their participating in paper collections.

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  1. School of Computer and Electronic Information / School of Artificial Intelligence, Nanjing Normal University, Nanjing, Jiangsu, China

    Liming Shen, Xueyi Chen, Richen Liu, Hailong Wang & Genlin Ji

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Shen, L., Chen, X., Liu, R. et al. Domain-Specific Language Techniques for Visual Computing: A Comprehensive Study. Arch Computat Methods Eng 28, 3113–3134 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11831-020-09492-4

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