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Succeeding at Impossible Industrial Projects with Generative Technologies

- Vadim Zaytsev

In practice, it is not trivial to motivate the use of program
generation techniques in the context of marginal gains and slight
improvements the impact of which might become completely invisible on
the grand scheme of things. Raincode is a company with more than two
decades of experience in the projects of the opposite kind: the ones
executed in teams of one or two, rarely three people, over the course
of months, and in some cases even days. This is achieved by making
heavy use of technologies such as domain modelling, domain-specific
languages, model-driven engineering, metaprogramming, modularisation,
parser generation and program generation.

In this talk, one of such projects will be explored in detail: the
Raincode Assembler Compiler, which successfully got through the first
PoC last year and was also presented at SLE 2016 at SPLASH in
Amsterdam. The final deployable artefact is compiled from 3 MLOC C
code, yet it was a result of approximately one year of part-time
attention of three developers, responsible respectively for the
instruction set emulation, the modular compiler framework, and IDE
integration. The infrastructure of the product is also not
prototypical, it is robust and mature, and includes many advanced
features such as hot swapping of instruction sets. These millions of
lines of code were generated from a program in a DSL for compiler
writing, and the runtime of the programs compiled by it was also
generated from the models extracted from the language specification
and curated by verification and testing. Projects like the Raincode
Assembler Compiler can only succeed thanks to program generation, and
are simply impossible with less than 100% automation. Several examples
of projects of similar nature will also be given.

Link to the product:
http://www.raincode.com/mainframe-rehosting/asm370-compiler/