SIGMA: Scala Internal Domain-Specific Languages for Model Manipulations

Filip Krikava (1, 2) , Philippe Collet (3) , Robert France (4)

1 LIFL - Laboratoire d'Informatique Fondamentale de Lille
2 SPIRALS - Self-adaptation for distributed services and large software systems
3 Laboratoire d'Informatique, Signaux, et Systèmes de Sophia-Antipolis (I3S) / Equipe MODALIS
4 CSU - Colorado State University [Fort Collins]

Model manipulation environments automate model operations such as model consistency checking and model transformation. A number of external model manipulation Domain-Specific Languages (DSL) have been proposed, in particular for the Eclipse Modeling Framework (EMF). While their higher levels of abstraction result in gains in expressiveness over general-purpose languages, their limitations in versatility, performance, and tool support together with the need to learn new languages may significantly contribute to accidental complexities. In this paper, we present Sigma, a family of internal DSLs embedded in Scala for EMF model consistency checking, model-to-model and model-to-text transformations. It combines the benefits of external model manipulation DSLs with general-purpose programming taking full advantage of Scala versatility, performance and tool support. The DSLs are compared to the state-of-the-art Epsilon languages in non-trivial model manipulation tasks that resulted in 20% to 70% reduction in code size and significantly better performance.

Domaines: Génie logiciel [cs.SE]

Filip Krikava, Philippe Collet, Robert France. SIGMA: Scala Internal Domain-Specific Languages for Model Manipulations. MODELS - 17th International Conference on Model Driven Engineering Languages and Systems, Sep 2014, Valencia, Spain. ⟨hal-01010339⟩