??? The truth is, every application must be compiled
and linked to be any use (substitute compile and link with appropriate terms for your
language!). If you do not automate this process, developers will be forced to carry it
out manually every time. In addition to being error prone and hard to reproduce, this is
also boring, leading to developers not doing it when they should.
Our experience in DSM is that a working autobuild provides far more value than
could be imagined. In particular, automatically running the generated application
provides a newlevel of abstraction that has to be experienced to be believed. There is a
real power in going directly from modeling to seeing the full application running??”not
a prototype or simulation, but the actual application. As the models are on a high level
GENERATOR STRUCTURE 297
of abstraction, often close to the concepts of the end user of the application, you really
have the feeling of staying focused on what you actually want in the application, rather
than the details of how to implement it.
As the saying has it, though, you can??™t make an omelette without breaking some
eggs, so for others to be able to ignore the details of how to implement their programs,
we need to look here at the details of how to implement such support. But hang on a
minute, isn??™t there some clever meta trick we could apply here, so we can ignore the
details of this task? Funnily enough, there is,andyou??™ll beforgivenyourlackof surprise
when we tell you it??™s using a domain-speci?¬?c language.
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