This week saw xDSL’s Michel Weber give a presentation at the ETH Zurich computer science research lab seminar about the xDSL project. Michel was talking about how, in the past year or so, xDSL has grown into a fully fledged open source compiler infrastructure library that enables programmers to build compilers in a high productivity manner.

xDSL has been especially useful in Michel’s work as he is focussed around enriching database abstractions using compilation. With xDSL able to handle much of the overhead of writing DSLs, this significantly lowers the barrier to entry in fast prototyping for these architectures.

Michel has also been a core contributor to the central xDSL framework, and so was uniquely placed to give researchers at ETH Zurich an insight into what we believe xDSL can contribute and the current challenges. The slides are available to view here.