Building mbeddr: a Language Engineering Experiment

Markus Völter

Over the last four years a team at fortiss and itemis have built mbeddr, an extensible set of integrated languages for embedded software development. mbeddr rests on the JetBrains MPS language workbench. MPS has a projectional editor, which enables wide-ranging language modularity and flexible notations that include text, prose, tables, mathematics and graphics. As far as we know, mbeddr is the largest and most sophisticated system built on top of a projectional language workbench. In this talk I will recap the "mbeddr experience", good and bad. I will show mbeddr and some of the systems built with it, and argue why we think it could not have been built with other existing language workbenches. I will also point out the problems we had to fight with during mbeddr's construction, including those created by MPS as well as those that resulted from our own ignorance. I will close the talk by indentifying some of the areas in which MPS could be (or is currently being) improved: some of them are certainly interesting topics for academic research.