[antlr-interest] Creating extension libraries for a DSL

[Andreas Stefik]

Cliff,

I'm not asking how to make abstractions or functions, or "how to look
at other languages and figure it out myself." No matter the
abstraction mechanisms you have in place (and we have a bunch of them
in our language), for you to complete certain kinds of operations you
need some kind of a low level bridge that can ultimately tell new, or
unique, pieces of hardware to physically do something. For example, if
a user wanted to add in a MIDI controller in our language, or a sound
library, or to tap into an ethernet controller, or some unique piece
of hardware we haven't considered, that simply would not exist unless
we had a low level bridge, which they could then tie into both the
hardware and our language, and then ultimately build abstractions
around in our language (e.g., a wrapper to a JNI library, as I stated
before).

There's lots of ways to approach it. LUA has an interesting approach.
Java uses JNI, while C allows you to embed assembly directly if
desired. I'm curious what more modern approaches folks take.

Stefik

On Fri, Apr 2, 2010 at 9:29 PM, Cliff Hudson <cliff.s.hudson at gmail.com> wrote:
> Have you looked at other languages and seen a pattern you like?  You could
> then follow that pattern.  Typically adding extensions as keywords would be,
> well, basically something no one does at this point.  Assuming you support
> the concept of a function call, then having otherwise unresolved functions
> go through a resolution system which, say, looks at a list of declared
> imports and figures out if the function is in one of them is a
> well-understood pattern.
>
> On Fri, Apr 2, 2010 at 8:32 AM, Andreas Stefik <stefika at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> Hey folks,
>>
>> Our development team here is nearly complete with a DSL that we've
>> designed and are hoping to ship the first open-source version in July
>> or so. Right now, we parse down to the ANTLR Java target and are
>> preparing for the version past this release, which I think needs to
>> include some extension libraries for the language. For example, while
>> our DSL can do all of the typical language things (e.g., if
>> statements, looping), there are no APIs or libraries for doing file
>> IO, connecting to hardware, network programming, or other such things.
>>
>> Does this community have any experience adding in these sorts of
>> features, as in, suggestions as for what kind of approach we should
>> take? For example, we could allow something like a Java Native
>> Interface, that would allow a developer to connect in utilities that
>> allow things like File access. Or, we could allow custom native
>> functions for low level things, like a file keyword, but that doesn't
>> sound very flexible or extensible.
>>
>> Any general suggestions on an appropriate approach to take?
>>
>> Stefik
>>
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