[kagebe]

Xtext and AnyDSL have very different goals. Xtext is mostly about Syntax and IDE-Support, while AnyDSL is about compilation. With Xtext you'll get support for defining the grammar of your language, but you'll write your own compiler for your DSL - the DSL is "deeply-embedded" in the host language Java, that is: represented as a Java datastructure. In AnyDSL, you don't have any support for custom syntax - all your DSLs are basically just "libraries"/types/functions in the host language Impala - a "shallow" embedding. Java examples of shallow embedding are most "fluent interface" libraries, e.g. jOOQ[1].

This has the benefit that you don't need to know about compiler tech to implement your DSL. However, a domain-specific compiler can optimize using domain-specific knowledge and potentially generate faster code. For this reason AnyDSL/Impala provides online partial evaluation with the '@' operator, which aggressively specializes functions and evaluates at compile time. With the right DSL abstractions, this can result in generated code that is as fast as hand-tuned code.

For a more complete view of the relation between partial evaluation and DSL embedding, have a look at the GPCE'15 paper[2].

We totally agree that the website and documentation (there is some in the github wikis) is lacking at the moment and we're working on them. However, AnyDSL is still a young research project.

[1] http://www.jooq.org/doc/3.9/manual/sql-building/sql-statemen... [2] http://compilers.cs.uni-saarland.de/papers/gpce15.pdf