Experience Report: Playing the DSL Card A Domain Specific Language for Component Configuration

This paper describes our experience using a functional language, Haskell, to build an embedded, domain-specific language (DSL) for component configuration in large-scale, real-time, embedded systems. Prior to the introduction of the DSL, engineers would de-scribe the steps needed to configure a particular system in a hand-written XML document. In this paper, we outline the application domain, give a brief overview of the DSL that we developed, and provide concrete data to demonstrate its effectiveness. In particular, we show that the DSL has several significant benefits over the orig-inal, XML-based approach including reduced code size, increased modularity and scalability, and detection and prevention of com-mon defects. For example, using the DSL, we were able to produce clear and intuitive descriptions of component configurations that were sometimes less than 1/30 of the size of the original XML. Categories and Subject Descriptors D.3.2 [Programming Lan