Domain-specific language integration with compile-time parser generator library

Abstract

Smooth integration of domain-specific languages into a general purpose host language requires absorbing of domain code written in arbitrary syntax. The integration should cause minimal syntactical and semantic overhead and introduce minimal dependency on external tools. In this paper we discuss a DSL integration technique for the C++ programming language. The solution is based on compile-time parsing of the DSL code. The parser generator is a C++ template metaprogram reimplementation of a runtime Haskell parser generator library. The full parsing phase is executed when the host program is compiled. The library uses only standard C++ language features, thus our solution is highly portable. As a demonstration of the power of this approach, we present a highly efficient and type-safe version of printf and the way it can be constructed using our library. Despite the well known syntactical difficulties of C++ template metaprograms, building embedded languages using our library leads to self-documenting C++ source code.