Building game scripting DSL’s with the Metacasanova metacompiler

Abstract

Many video games rely on a Domain Specific Language (DSL) to implement particular features such as artificial intelligence or time and synchronization primitives. Building a compiler for a DSL is a time-consuming task, and adding new features to a DSL is hard due to the low flexibility of the implementation choice. In this paper, we introduce an alternative to hand-made implementations of compilers for DSLs for game development: the Metacasanova metacompiler. We show the advantages of this metacomplier in terms of simplicity of designing and coding requirements, and in terms of performance of the resulting code, whose efficiency is comparable with hand-made implementations in commercial general purpose languages.