Domain-specific languages have long been a popular way to shorten the distance from ideas to products in software engineering. On one hand, the interface of a DSL lets domain experts express high-level concepts succinctly in familiar notation, such as grammars for text or scripts for animation, and often provides guarantees and tools that take advantage of the specifics of the domain to help write and maintain these particular programs. On the other hand, the implementation of a DSL can automate many tasks traditionally performed by a few experts to turn a specification into an executable, thus making this expertise available widely. Overall, a DSL thus mediates a collaboration between its users and implementers that results in software that is more usable, more portable, more reliable, and more understandable.

These benefits of DSLs have been delivered in domains old and new, such as signal processing, data mining, and Web scripting. Widely known examples of DSLs include Matlab, Verilog, SQL, LINQ, HTML, OpenGL, Macromedia Director, Mathematica, Maple, AutoLisp/AutoCAD, XSLT, RPM, Make, lex/yacc, LaTeX, PostScript, and Excel. Despite these successes, the adoption of DSLs have been stunted by the lack of general tools and principles for developing, compiling, and verifying domain-specific programs. General support for building and using DSLs is thus urgently needed. Languages that straddle the line between the domain-specific and the general-purpose, such as Perl, Tcl/Tk, and JavaScript, suggest that such support be based on modern notions of language design and software engineering. The goal of this conference, following the last one in 2009, is to explore how present and future DSLs can fruitfully draw from and potentially enrich these notions.

We seek research papers on the theory and practice of DSLs, including but not limited to the following topics.

• Foundations, including semantics, formal methods, type theory, and complexity theory
• Language design, including concrete syntax, semantics, and types
• Software engineering, including domain analysis, software design, and round-trip engineering
• Modularity and composability of DSLs
• Software processes, including metrics for software and language evaluation
• Implementation, including parsing, compiling, program generation, program analysis, transformation, optimization, and parallelization
• Reverse engineering, re-engineering, design discovery, automated refactoring
• Hardware/software codesign
• Programming environments and tools, including visual languages, debuggers, testing, and verification
• Teaching DSLs and the use of DSLs in teaching
• Case studies in any domain, especially the general lessons they provide for DSL design and implementation

The conference will include a visit to the city of Bordeaux, a tour and tasting at the wine museum and cellar, and a banquet at La Belle Époque.

Instructions for authors

Papers will be judged on the depth of their insight and the extent to which they translate specific experience into general lessons for software engineers and DSL designers and implementers. Where appropriate, papers should refer to actual languages, tools, and techniques, provide pointers to full definitions, proofs, and implementations, and include empirical results.

Proceedings will be published in Electronic Proceedings in Theoretical Computer Science (http://info.eptcs.org/). Submissions and final manuscripts should be at most 25 pages in EPTCS format.

Please submit your abstract and paper using EasyChair at https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=dsl2011

Important dates

• 2011-04-25: Abstracts due (extended deadline)
• 2011-05-02: Submissions due (extended deadline)
• 2011-06-10: Authors notified of decisions
• 2011-07-11: Final manuscripts due
• 2011-09-06/2011-09-08: Conference

Program committee

• Emilie Balland (INRIA)
• Olaf Chitil (University of Kent)
• Zoé Drey (IRIT)
• Nate Foster (Cornell University)
• Mayer Goldberg (Ben-Gurion University)
• Shan Shan Huang (LogicBlox)
• Sam Kamin (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)
• Jerzy Karczmarczuk (University of Caen)
• Jan Midtgaard (Aarhus University)
• Keiko Nakata (Tallinn University of Technology)
• Klaus Ostermann (University of Marburg)
• Jeremy Siek (University of Colorado at Boulder)
• Tony Sloane (Macquarie University)
• Josef Svenningsson (Chalmers University of Technology)
• Paul Tarau (University of North Texas)
• Dana N. Xu (INRIA)

Organizers

Local chair: Emilie Balland (INRIA)
Program chairs: Olivier Danvy (Aarhus University), Chung-chieh Shan (Rutgers University)