Industrial Experiences with a Formal DSL Semantics to Check the Correctness of DSL Artifacts

TL;DR

This paper discusses the importance of formal semantics in DSLs for ensuring correctness of generated artifacts, demonstrating industrial application using formal verification techniques.

Contribution

It introduces a formal semantics approach for DSLs and reports on its industrial application for verifying artifact correctness.

Findings

Formal semantics enables effective correctness checking.

Equivalence checking and model-based testing validate generated artifacts.

Industrial case study demonstrates practical benefits.

Abstract

A domain specific language (DSL) abstracts from implementation details and is aligned with the way domain experts reason about a software component. The development of DSLs is usually centered around a grammar and transformations that generate implementation code or analysis models. The semantics of the language is often defined implicitly and in terms of a transformation to implementation code. In the presence of multiple transformations from the DSL, the correctness of the generated artifacts with respect to the semantics of the DSL is a relevant issue. We show that a formal semantics is essential for checking the correctness of the generated artifacts. We exploit the formal semantics in an industrial project and use formal techniques based on equivalence checking and model-based testing for validating the correctness of the generated artifacts. We report about our experience with this approach in an industrial development project.