SoSyM manuscript No. (will be inserted by the editor) Bridging the Chasm Between MDE and the World of Compilation

Abstract Modeling and transforming have always been the cornerstones of software system development, albeit often in-vestigated by different research communities. Modeling ad-dresses how information is represented and processed, while transformation cares about what the results of processing this information are. To address the growing complexity of soft-ware systems, Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) leverages Domain Specific Languages (DSL) to define abstract models of systems and automated methods to process them. Mean-while, compiler technology mostly concentrates on advanced techniques and tools for program transformation. For this, it has developed complex analyses and transformations (from lexical and syntaxic to semantic analyses, down to platform-specific optimizations). These two communities appear today quite complementary and are starting to meet again in the Software Language Engineering (SLE) field. SLE addresses all the stages of a software language lifecycle, from its defini-tion to its tooling. In this article, we show how SLE can lean on the expertise of both MDE and compiler research commu-nities and how each community can bring its solutions to the other one. We then draw a picture of the current state of SLE, and of the challenges it has still to face.