On the Reusable Specification of Non-functional Properties in DSLs

Abstract

Domain-specific languages (DSLs) are an important tool for effective system development. They provide concepts that are close to the problem domain and allow analysis as well as generation of full solution implementations. However, this comes at the cost of having to develop a new language for every new domain. To make their development efficient, we must be able to construct DSLs as much as possible from reusable building blocks. In this paper, we discuss how such building blocks can be constructed for the specification and analysis of a range of non-functional properties, such as, for example, throughput, response time, or reliability properties. We assume DSL semantics to be provided through a set of transformation rules, which enables a range of analyses based on model checking. We demonstrate new concepts for defining language modules for the specification of non-functional properties, show how these can be integrated with base DSL specifications, and provide a number of syntactic conditions that we prove maintain the semantics of the base DSL even in the presence of non-functional–property specifications.