Tales from 1002 Repositories: Development and Evolution of Xtext-based DSLs on GitHub
Paper i proceeding, 2024

Domain-specific languages (DSLs) play a crucial role in facilitating a wide range of software development activities in the context of model-driven engineering (MDE). However, there exists a significant gap in the systematic understanding of how DSLs evolve over time, which could hamper the development of effective methodologies and tools. To address this gap, we performed a comprehensive investigation into the development and evolution of textual DSLs created with Xtext, a particularly widely used language workbench in the MDE community. Through a systematic analysis of 1002 GitHub repositories, we explore DSL development practices with an emphasis on the involved artifact types, development scenarios, evolution activities, and the co-evolution of related artifacts. We find that the majority of analyzed languages were developed following a grammar-driven approach, although a notable number adopt a metamodel-driven approach. Additionally, we identify a trend of retrofitting existing languages in Xtext, illustrating the framework’s flexibility beyond the creation of new DSLs. Addressing a need for large and systematically documented datasets in the model-driven engineering community, we contribute a dataset of repositories together with our collected meta-information, which can be used to inform the development of improved tools for supporting the development and evolution of DSLs.

Xtext

software evolution

DSLs

Författare

Weixing Zhang

Software Engineering 1

Daniel Struber

Chalmers, Data- och informationsteknik, Software Engineering

50th Euromicro Conference Series on Software Engineering and Advanced Applications (SEAA) 2024

50th Euromicro Conference Series on Software Engineering and Advanced Applications (SEAA) 2024
Paris, France,

Styrkeområden

Informations- och kommunikationsteknik

Ämneskategorier

Programvaruteknik

Datorsystem

Mer information

Skapat

2024-07-09