[anikom15]

DSLs and general purpose languages are not comparable. DSLs are generally designed to handle data, while general purpose languages can handle everything. Where DSLs fall apart is when you either need to (a) work with I/O in a different format than the DSL handles data in (including working with hardware) or (b) the scope of data changes into something that now incorporates information outside the DSL’s domain.

For (a), a simple example is an application that reads information from a DAQ, stores it in a database in a compressed format, and later sends the data to a printer. We have a DSL that can easily implement the database, but we need to translate the data from the DAQ into a compatible input, so that requires a different language. Furthermore, the printer requires postscript, so we need some other language or tool for that. Then we need to figure out how to glue it all together. In some cases, it becomes tempting to try to ‘hack’ the DSL into trying to do things it was never designed for.

Or we could just use a general purpose language and libraries.