Quadrature-free discontinuous Galerkin method with code generation features for shallow water equations on automatically generated block-structured meshes

•Quadrature-free discontinuous Galerkin discretizations have the potential to increase model code performance.•Block-structured grids are a compromise between the structured (not geometrically flexible) and unstructured (difficult to make computationally efficient) ones.•Code generation and domain-specific languages allow for a separation of concerns between applications scientists and code developers.