Generating Version Convertors for Domain-Specific Languages

Domain-specific languages (DSLs) improve programmer productivity by providing high-level abstractions for the development of applications in a particular domain. However,the smaller distance to the application domain entails more frequent changes to the language. As a result, existing DSL models need to be converted to the new version. Manual conversion is tedious and error prone.This paper presents an approach to support DSL evolution by generation of convertors between DSLs. By analyzing the differences between DSL meta-models, a mapping is reverse engineered which can be used to generate reengineering tools to automatically convert models between different versions of a DSL. The approach has been implemented for the Microsoft DSL Tools infrastructure in two tools called DSLCompare and ConverterGenerator. The approach has been evaluated by means of three case studies taken from the software development practice at the company Avanade.