Embedding a DSL into D source

Justin Johansson see-body-of-message-for-name at adam.com.au
Mon Oct 12 08:24:10 PDT 2009


I'm working on a mini domain specific language (called say, MyDSL) which compiles to
(generates) D code and am thinking that it might be nice to be able to embed MyDSL statements
directly in a D source file in manner similar to string mixins.  It's use might look something like this:

void foo()
{
    MyDSLResult res = mixin( mydsl( `some-mydsl-statement-here`);
   now_do_something_with( res);
}

There was a question similar to this somewhere around DM newsgroups a while back
(regarding embedding Scheme I think?), but as I recall there wasn't any definitive
feedback on the idea.  Also, being still relatively new to D, there are a number of possibly
related threads on the NGs that have gone over my head, so please bear with me if this
has been dealt with before.

My specific question is:

What would be the best way of embedding some DSL code into D source code?
Is there some cool feature of D (that I don't yet know about) that lets you employ
string mixins for this purpose, or would one need to write a preprocessor to grok D
source code in order to compile in the embedded DSL code?

The alternative is just to compile/translate MyDSL code into a standalone D source module
and just run with that .. though the idea of actually embedding directly into D does
have some real appeal (at least to me).

Hope this makes sense and, as usual, thanks for all help,

-- Justin Johansson



More information about the Digitalmars-d-learn mailing list