Data-flow analyses are used as part of many software engineering tasks: they are the foundations of program under- standing, refactorings and optimized code generation. Similar to general-purpose languages (GPLs), state-of-the-art domain-specific languages (DSLs) also require sop
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Data-flow analyses are used as part of many software engineering tasks: they are the foundations of program under- standing, refactorings and optimized code generation. Similar to general-purpose languages (GPLs), state-of-the-art domain-specific languages (DSLs) also require sophisticated data-flow analyses. However, as a consequence of the different economies of DSL development and their typically relatively fast evolution, the effort for developing and evolving such analyses must be lowered compared to GPLs. This tension can be resolved with dedicated support for data-flow analyses in language workbenches.
In this tool paper we present MPS-DF, which is the component in the MPS language workbench that supports the definition of data-flow analyses for DSLs. Language developers can define data-flow graph builders declaratively as part of a language definition and compute analysis results efficiently based on these data-flow graphs. MPS-DF is extensible such that it does not compromise the support for language composition in MPS. Additionally, clients of MPS-DF analyses can run the analyses with variable precision thus trading off precision for performance. This allows clients to tailor an analysis to a particular use case.
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