Declaratively Defining Domain-Specific Language Debuggers

Declaratively Defining Domain-Specific Language Debuggers

Lindeman, R.T.
Kats, L.C.L.
Visser, E.

Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science

Software Technology

2011-12-31

Tool support is vital to the effectiveness of domain-specific languages. With language workbenches, domain-specific languages and their tool support can be generated from a combined, high-level specification. This paper shows how such a specification can be extended to describe a debugger for a language. To realize this, we introduce a meta-language for coordinating the debugger that abstracts over the complexity of writing a debugger by hand. We describe the implementation of a language-parametric infrastructure for debuggers that can be instantiated based on this specification. The approach is implemented in the Spoofax language workbench and validated through realistic case studies with the Stratego transformation language and the WebDSL web programming language. This paper is a pre-print of: Ricky T. Lindeman, Lennart C. L. Kats, Eelco Visser. Declaratively Defining Domain-Specific Language Debuggers. In Ewen Denney, Ulrik Pagh Schultz, editors, Generative Programming and Component Engineering, 7th International Conference, GPCE 2011, Portland, OR, USA, October 22-23, 2011, Proceedings. ACM, 2011.

Debugging
Domain-Specific Language
Language Workbench
Spoofax

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:75dd33f1-f77b-45fa-860f-9442e1645ece

Delft University of Technology, Software Engineering Research Group

1872-5392

Technical Report Series TUD-SERG-2011-012

https://doi.org/10.1145/2047862.2047885

Institutional Repository

report

(c) 2011 The authors. Software Engineering Research Group, Department of Software Technology, Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science, Delft University of Technology.