How deeply does Building User-Friendly DSLs cover language workbench?

Defines core components and evaluation criteria, but stops short of implementing a DSL with a specific workbench.

Language workbench

As explained in Building User-Friendly DSLs

A software tool or environment for designing, implementing, and deploying programming languages and their development tools.

A language workbench (LWB) is a platform for implementing software languages, especially domain-specific languages (DSLs), efficiently. It often takes the form of a specialized IDE and uses meta-DSLs to define structure, constraints, editors, type systems, and code generation. section 15.4.1 section 15.5

Assess a language workbench by considering:

Maturity, including software quality and documentation. section 15.4.1
DSL style: textual and parsing-based, or projectional, with graphical notation as an extreme. section 15.4.1
Openness, support, community, and operating-system or platform compatibility. section 15.4.1

A workbench can accelerate DSL implementation, but using one effectively requires working knowledge of DSL implementation. Building a DSL from scratch exposes that knowledge without committing to a vendor’s terminology or tools that may later change. section 15.4.1

How Building User-Friendly DSLs covers it

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Related concepts

meta-DSLuses · A meta-DSL is a domain-specific language for specifying aspects of another domain-specific language or its tooling.
Siriusincludes · An Eclipse-based language workbench for creating graphical domain-specific languages for desktop and web environments.
MPSincludes · JetBrains MPS (Meta Programming System) is a language workbench for creating domain-specific languages and their associated development environments.
Xtextincludes · An Eclipse-based language workbench for creating textual domain-specific languages and their development tooling.

This explainer was generated by Manning's knowledge graph from the text of Building User-Friendly DSLs. The section links point to the parts of the book it draws on.