Sunday, February 25, 2007

Domain specific language(s) for EDA?

Just now, I viewed this tech-talk@google video.
It touts domain specific languages as the next big thing in software. A Domain specific language is a language designed for a particular domain. For example HTML is a language designed for designing web pages, MySql is a language for database manipulation, etc. Speaker cites the biggest advantage of DSL(s) being that they lessen the communication-loss from the specifications to programming, which is the most popular way of developing software today.

For example, if I am to develop a software, I go to the client, get the specifications and use it to write a program. But the language that is used to write the specs is loosely-coupled with the language that is used to develop the software, so there is a communication-gap and communication-loss in this process.

What happens when the language that is used to write the software closely mimics the language of the domain that the software belongs to?
For e.g.<title>Page-title<\title>, this HTML
piece of a web-page succinctly captures the user-intent. Compare it to how would it be written
and used in C.

Using a DSL will make life a lot more easier for the client and for someone who has to actually maintain the code. But for someone who has to develop the code, there will be a learning-curve. So there are these pros and cons.


Well, my point is, is there any DSL being developed for EDA?
Or, how good an idea will it be to have a DSL for EDA?

Java for EDA Tools

Are there any(popular/unpopular) EDA tools(not the GUI part), which are built using Java?
If yes, how are the stringent memory allocation-deallocation requirements met?
If no, why not?

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