Interoperability and Composition of DSLs with Melange

Domain-Specific Languages (DSLs) are now developed for a wide variety of domains to address specific concerns in the development of complex systems. However, DSLs and their tooling still suffer from substantial development costs which hamper their successful adoption in the industry. For over a decade, researchers and practitioners have developed language workbenches with the promise to ease the development of DSLs. Despite many advances, there is still little support for advanced scenarios such as language evolution, composition , and interoperability. In this paper, we present a modular approach for assembling DSLs from other ones and seamlessly evolving them, while ensuring the reuse of associated tools through subsequent versions or across similar DSLs. We introduce the conceptual foundations of our approach, its implementation in the Melange language workbench, and summarize its benefits on various case studies