Programming

There are domain-specific libraries for many domains, enabling rapid and cost-effective de-velopment of complex applications. On the other hand, domain-specific languages are rare despite the performance advantages of compilation. We believe the reason is the multiple orders-of-magnitude higher cost of building a compiler compared to building a library. We propose commensal compilation, a new strategy for compiling embedded domain-specific languages by reusing the massive investment in modern language virtual machine plat-forms. Commensal compilers use the host language’s front-end, use an autotuner instead of optimization heuristics, and use host platform APIs that enable back-end optimizations by the host platform JIT. The cost of implementing a commensal compiler is only the cost of implementing the domain-specific optimizations. We demonstrate the concept by im-plementing a commensal compiler for the stream programming language StreamJIT ato