We report on an industrial case study on developing the embedded software for a smart meter using the C programming language and domain-specific extensions of C such as components, physical units, state machines, registers and interrupts. We find that the extensions help significantly with managing the complexity of the software. They improve testability mainly by supporting hardware-independent testing, as illustrated by low integration efforts. The extensions also do not incur significant overhead regarding memory consumption and performance. Our case study relies on mbeddr, an extensible version of C. mbeddr, in turn, builds on the MPS language workbench which supports modular extension of languages and IDEs.

This paper explores the use of domain-specific languages for improving software security, which deals with developing software in a way that is not maliciously exploitable. Specifically we demonstrate how modular extension of the C programming language can help with technical and process-related aspects of software security. Some of these examples are already implemented, some are analytical extrapolations from related work we have done in the past; a detailed empirical evaluation has not yet been done. We rely on mbeddr, an extensible version of C developed with the JetBrains MPS language workbench. We conclude the paper with a discussion of the potential drawbacks of the approach and how these can be addressed in the future.

The interactions of several languages within a software system pose a number of problems. There is several anecdotal and empirical evidence supporting such concerns. This paper presents a solution to achieve proper language integration in the context of language workbenches and with limited effort. A simple example is presented to show how cross-language constraints can be addressed and the quality of the support attainable, which covers error-checking and refactoring. A research agenda is then presented, to support future work in the area of language integration, taking advantage of modern language workbenches features.