Transformational Generation of Language Plug-ins in the Harmonia Framework

The Harmonia framework provides an infrastructure for building language-aware interactive programming tools. Harmonia supports many languages through language plug-ins, which are dynamically-loadable system extensions generated from lexical, syntactic, and semantic descriptions. In this report, we describe our approach to generating Harmonia language plug-ins from a variety of domain-specific description languages. We present the process of configuring plug-in analysis components, the transformations for high-level syntactic and semantic descriptions, and the optimizations for generated code. This largely adhoc process makes our generation techniques expensive to create and difficult to maintain. We propose a new component-based architecture based on transformational generation, present its benefits, and outline several research directions that still need to be addressed by the generative programming community. ∗This work was supported in part by NSF Grant CCR-0098314 and by an IBM Eclipse Innovation Grant.