JavaRAG: a Java library for reference attribute grammars

Reference attribute grammars (RAGs) is a powerful formalism for developing modular extensible compilers and program analysis tools. This paper presents JavaRAG, an implementation of RAGs as a Java library that is independent of the abstract syntax tree structure. This makes it possible to extend legacy compilers implemented in Java with RAG computations. We have evaluated the approach by integrating with EMF, ANTLR, and hand-built abstract syntax trees, and we compare performance and specification size with JastAdd and Kiama which are other RAG-based tools. Our JavaRAG library is open source and is used in a compiler for the dataflow language CAL.