JavaRAG: a Java library for reference attribute grammars

Abstract

Reference attribute grammars (RAGs) is a powerful formalism for developing modular extensible compilers and program analysis tools. This paper presents JavaRAG, an implementation of RAGs as a Java library that is independent of the abstract syntax tree structure. This makes it possible to extend legacy compilers implemented in Java with RAG computations. We have evaluated the approach by integrating with EMF, ANTLR, and hand-built abstract syntax trees, and we compare performance and specification size with JastAdd and Kiama which are other RAG-based tools. Our JavaRAG library is open source and is used in a compiler for the dataflow language CAL.

Continuous model validation using reference attribute grammars

“…In addition, JastEMF does not have support for incremental evaluation. JavaRAG [8] is another related approach allowing RAGs to be added on top of any spanning tree, as long as a traversal API can be implemented. JavaRAG has been used to add a RAG to an EMF metamodel.…”

“…To approach continuous evaluation, researchers recently applied Reference Attribute Grammars (RAGs) [14] to encode and validate models, e.g., [6][7][8], because RAG systems offer mechanisms to perform an incremental analysis efficiently using dynamic dependency tracking [35]. Although RAG systems can efficiently rewrite and re-evaluate complex, large tree structures with derived information, including references, there exists a fundamental semantic mismatch between models, generally represented as graphs, and RAG trees.…”

Deciding Equivalence of Separated Non-nested Attribute Systems in Polynomial Time

“…Attribute grammars are a well-established formalism for realizing computations on syntax trees [21,22], and implementations are available for various programming languages, see, e.g. [30,29,13]. A fundamental question for any such specification formalism is whether two specifications are semantically equivalent.…”