αRby—An Embedding of Alloy in Ruby

Abstract

We present αRby—an embedding of the Alloy language in Ruby—and demonstrate the benefits of having a declarative modeling language (backed by an automated solver) embedded in a traditional object-oriented imperative programming language. This approach aims to bring these two distinct paradigms (imperative and declarative) together in a novel way. We argue that having the other paradigm available within the same language is beneficial to both the modeling community of Alloy users and the object-oriented community of Ruby programmers. In this paper, we primarily focus on the benefits for the Alloy community, namely, how αRby provides elegant solutions to several well-known, outstanding problems: (1) mixed execution, (2) specifying partial instances, (3) staged model finding.