research-article

Apples and oranges: comparing top-down and bottom-up language product lines

Authors:

Walter CazzolaAuthors Info & Claims

SPLC '16: Proceedings of the 20th International Systems and Software Product Line Conference

Pages 50 - 59

https://doi.org/10.1145/2934466.2934470

Published: 16 September 2016 Publication History

Abstract

Over the past decade language development tools have been significantly improved. This permitted both practitioners and researchers to design a wide variety of domain-specific languages (DSL) and extensions to programming languages. Moreover, multiple researchers have combined different language variants to form families of DSLs as well as programming languages. Unfortunately, current language development tools cannot directly support the development of these families. To overcome this limitation, researchers have recently applied ideas from software product lines (SPL) to create product lines of compilers/interpreters for language families, denoted language product lines (LPL). Similar to SPLs, however, these product lines can be created either using a top-down or a bottom-up approach. Yet, there exist no case study comparing the suitability of both approaches to the development of LPLs, making it unclear how language development tools should evolve. Accordingly, this paper compares both feature modeling approaches by applying them to the development of an LPL for the family of role-based programming languages and discussing their applicability, feasibility and overall suitability for the development of LPLs. Although one might argue that this compares apples and oranges, we believe that this case still provides crucial insights into the requirements, assumptions, and challenges of each approach.

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Cited By

Cazzola WFavalli L(2023)Scrambled Features for Breakfast: Concepts of Agile Language DevelopmentCommunications of the ACM10.1145/359621766:11(50-60)Online publication date: 20-Oct-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3596217
Mahmood WStrüber DAnjorin ABerger T(2022)Effects of variability in models: a family of experimentsEmpirical Software Engineering10.1007/s10664-021-10112-327:3Online publication date: 1-May-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/s10664-021-10112-3
Cazzola WFavalli L(2022)Towards a recipe for language decomposition: quality assessment of language product linesEmpirical Software Engineering10.1007/s10664-021-10074-627:4Online publication date: 1-Jul-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/s10664-021-10074-6
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

Apples and oranges: comparing top-down and bottom-up language product lines
1. Software and its engineering
  1. Software creation and management
    1. Software development techniques
      1. Reusability
        Software product lines
  2. Software notations and tools
    1. Compilers
      1. Translator writing systems and compiler generators
    2. General programming languages
      1. Language features
        Frameworks

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cover image ACM Other conferences

SPLC '16: Proceedings of the 20th International Systems and Software Product Line Conference

September 2016

367 pages

ISBN:9781450340502

DOI:10.1145/2934466

General Chair:
Hong Mei
Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China

Copyright © 2016 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd.: Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd.
Key Laboratory of High Confidence Software Technologies: Key Laboratory of High Confidence Software Technologies, Ministry of Education
DC Holdings: Digital China Holdings Limited

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

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Published: 16 September 2016

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Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd.
Key Laboratory of High Confidence Software Technologies
DC Holdings

SPLC '16: The 20th International Systems and Software Product Line Conference

September 16 - 23, 2016

Beijing, China

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Cited By

Cazzola WFavalli L(2023)Scrambled Features for Breakfast: Concepts of Agile Language DevelopmentCommunications of the ACM10.1145/359621766:11(50-60)Online publication date: 20-Oct-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3596217
Mahmood WStrüber DAnjorin ABerger T(2022)Effects of variability in models: a family of experimentsEmpirical Software Engineering10.1007/s10664-021-10112-327:3Online publication date: 1-May-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/s10664-021-10112-3
Cazzola WFavalli L(2022)Towards a recipe for language decomposition: quality assessment of language product linesEmpirical Software Engineering10.1007/s10664-021-10074-627:4Online publication date: 1-Jul-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/s10664-021-10074-6
Pinnecke MMousavi MSchobbens P(2021)Product-lining the elinvar wealthtech microservice platformProceedings of the 25th ACM International Systems and Software Product Line Conference - Volume B10.1145/3461002.3473947(60-68)Online publication date: 6-Sep-2021
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3461002.3473947
Pfeiffer JWortmann A(2021)Towards the Black-Box Aggregation of Language Components2021 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Model Driven Engineering Languages and Systems Companion (MODELS-C)10.1109/MODELS-C53483.2021.00088(576-585)Online publication date: Oct-2021
https://doi.org/10.1109/MODELS-C53483.2021.00088
Favalli LKühn TCazzola WLopez-Herrejon R(2020)Neverlang and FeatureIDE just marriedProceedings of the 24th ACM Conference on Systems and Software Product Line: Volume A - Volume A10.1145/3382025.3414961(1-11)Online publication date: 19-Oct-2020
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3382025.3414961
Sobernig SSobernig S(2020)Variable Language ModelsVariable Domain-specific Software Languages with DjDSL10.1007/978-3-030-42152-6_3(73-136)Online publication date: 10-Jul-2020
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-42152-6_3
Sobernig SSobernig S(2020)DSL as Variable SoftwareVariable Domain-specific Software Languages with DjDSL10.1007/978-3-030-42152-6_1(1-31)Online publication date: 10-Jul-2020
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-42152-6_1
Kühn TCazzola WGiampietro NPoggi M(2019)Piggyback IDE Support for Language Product LinesProceedings of the 23rd International Systems and Software Product Line Conference - Volume A10.1145/3336294.3336301(131-142)Online publication date: 9-Sep-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3336294.3336301
Méndez-Acuña DGalindo JCombemale BBlouin ABaudry B(2018)Reverse engineering language product lines from existing DSL variantsProceedings of the 22nd International Systems and Software Product Line Conference - Volume 110.1145/3233027.3236394(248-248)Online publication date: 10-Sep-2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3233027.3236394
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