That's not a desirable state of affairs, according to Brahmakshatriya, who insists that every DSL should have its own debugger. It's very hard to write them, which is why most small DSLs don't have debugging support." The reason for that, he adds, "is that debuggers are very complicated. "Halide is very popular now, and it is used in many Adobe applications, including Photoshop, but it still doesn't have a debugger," Amarasinghe says. Its development was led by then-graduate student Jonathan-Ragan Kelley and Andrew Adams, a CSAIL postdoc at the time. Halide-an image processing language invented in 2012, years before BuildIt was around-is one of the first DSLs to come out of Amarasinghe's group. The more specialized you make the program, the faster it runs." BuildIt is designed to construct DSLs with those guiding principles in mind. "You could write a program to solve it in its entirety, or you could write a smaller program to solve just the subclass of the problem you're interested in.
"Suppose you have a problem, and you want to write a program to solve it," he says. The other is performance." Because the operations are specific to that domain, they can be more readily optimized-carried out in the proper order, and hence completed more efficiently and quickly.īrahmakshatriya describes BuildIt as "a DSL for creating DSLs." It facilitates a multistep procedure for taking an existing, all-purpose programming language and paring it down until it becomes specialized in just the right way. The main reason for producing a language in a specialized domain, Brahmakshatriya explains, "is to promote ease of use." An image-processing DSL, for example, could have a function that says "blur the entire image." Issuing that same command in a general-purpose language would require many more lines of code, notes Brahmakshatriya. Their paper on the work even won one of two Distinguished Paper Awards given at the conference.
And last month, at an international conference in Montreal co-sponsored by the Association for Computing Machinery, the duo introduced D2X, a tool that makes it easy to add debugging to any DSL and has been shown to work particularly well with BuildIt. In 2021, Brahmakshatriya and Amarasinghe introduced BuildIt, a software package that greatly simplifies the task of creating DSLs. It's been a productive few years for both of them. This process for getting rid of errors in a piece of software is essential, he and Amarasinghe agreed, as they have called the lack of debugging support "the Achilles heel for DSLs." A member of the research group headed by MIT Professor Saman Amarasinghe in the Institute's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), Brahmakshatriya wanted these languages to come with all the auxiliary functions people would need to comfortably utilize them, including tools for debugging.
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