TwistingTwists
Best resource to learn DSL?
I want to learn DSL. Don’t know how to write one. What;s the best introductory resource?
I see some macro being used here.
Is DSL only about using Macros to help write other functions easily?
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kartheek
DSL are used in runtime and compile time. At runtime they help customising the software through scripts or rules. Systems expose ability to customise the functionality/behaviour through the DSLs. For example rules editor in a firebase - Security Rules language | Firebase Security Rules . Quite a lot of google cloud services use Common Expression Language - GitHub - cel-expr/cel-spec: Common Expression Language -- specification and binary representation · GitHub
The complete guide to (external) Domain Specific Languages - Strumenta covers a lot of things about DSLs.
Elixir has metaprogramming through macros which is compile time.Ecto has DSL for simplifying queries for accessing the data. If your use case is writing a compile time DSL - elixir metaprogramming makes it easy. Runtime DSL in elixir needs a lot of things - like interpreter, etc to be implemented.
Implementing a DSL needs grammar to be formalised as language spec.
What are you trying to achieve with DSL in your application? Is it runtime or compile time ?
dimitarvp
More or less, yep. You can’t really learn DSL per se, DSLs are custom languages that you build yourself. For that you need to know Elixir macros.
I recently started the Metaprogramming Elixir book and I enjoy what I saw and tried so far, so that’s one possible resource for you.
csadewa
DSL is a concept closely associated with Domain Driven Design, the idea is to have a way to easily express things inside a particular domain. For the technical part, you could learn (like dimitarvp said) Metaprogramming Elixir / Elixir Macro. For the design part, you could learn Domain Driven Design (i would recommend
Implementing Domain Driven Designfor more easier time of reading DDD).Last Post!
kartheek
Thank you. Like @crispinb pointed out Sasa Juric’s blog post series is a good place to start.
Metaprogramming Elixir -Metaprogramming Elixir: Write Less Code, Get More Done (and Have Fun!) by Chris McCord is a book which is completely about Metaprogramming. You will find a coupon code in this forum for most of the elixir books.
One thing about metaprogramming is - it may not be needed most of the time. Using
importand functions might solve the problem. Chapter 6 of Metaprogramming Elixir book explains more about it.I learnt a lot by searching about how elixir, ecto and phoenix use defmacros in their code base: