Can we reuse some of the huge code-base developed in C to take advantage of modern programming language features such as type safety, object-orientation, and contracts? This paper presents a source-to-source translation of C code into Eiffel, a modern object-oriented programming language, and the supporting tool C2Eif. The translation is completely automatic and supports the entire C language (ANSI, as well as many GNU C Compiler extensions, through CIL) as used in practice, including its usage of native system libraries and inlined assembly code. Our experiments show that C2Eif can handle C applications and libraries of significant size (such as vim and libgsl), as well as challenging benchmarks such as the GCC torture tests. The produced Eiffel code is functionally equivalent to the original C code, and takes advantage of some of Eiffel's object-oriented features to produce safe and easy-to-debug translations

Abstract. Even when implemented in a purely procedural programming language, properly designed programs possess elements of good design that are expressible through object-oriented constructs and concepts. For example, placing structured types and the procedures operating on them together in the same module achieves a weak form of encapsulation that reduces inter-module coupling. This paper presents a novel technique, and a supporting tool AutoOO, that extracts such implicit design elements from C applications and uses them to build reengineered object-oriented programs. The technique is completely automatic: users only provide a source C program, and the tool produces an object-oriented application written in Eiffel with the same input/output behavior as the source. An extensive evaluation on 10 open-source programs (including the editor vim and the math library libgsl) demonstrates that our technique works on applications of significant size and builds reengineered programs exhibiting elements of good object-oriented design, such as low coupling and high cohesion of classes, and proper encapsulation. The reengineered programs also leverage advanced features such as inheritance, contracts, and exceptions to achieve a better usability and a clearer design. The tool AutoOO is freely available for download.

Abstract. Reusability is an important software engineering concept actively advocated for the last forty years. While reusability has been addressed for systems implemented using the same programming language, it does not usually handle interoperability with different programming languages. This paper presents a solution for the reuse of Java code within Eiffel programs based on a source-to-source translation from Java to Eiffel. The paper focuses on the critical aspects of the translation and illustrates them by formal means. The translation is implemented in the freely available tool J2Eif; it provides Eiffel replacements for the components of the Java runtime environment, including Java Native Interface services and reflection mechanisms. Our experiments demonstrate the practical usability of the translation scheme and its implementation, and record the performance slow-down compared to custom-made Eiffel applications: automatic translations of java.util data structures, java.io services, and SWT applications can be re-used as Eiffel programs, with the same functionalities as their original Java implementations.

Abstract-C2Eiffel is a fully automatic source-to-source translator of C applications into the Eiffel object-oriented programming language. C2Eiffel supports the complete C language, including function pointers, unrestricted pointer arithmetic and jumps, arbitrary native libraries, and inlined assembly code. It produces readable Eiffel code that behaves as the source C application; it takes advantage of some of Eiffel's object-oriented features to produce translations that are easy to maintain and debug, and often even safer than their sources thanks to stricter correctness checks introduced automatically. Experiments show that C2Eiffel handles C applications of significant size (such as vim and libgsl); it is a fully automatic tool suitable to reuse C code within a high-level object-oriented programming language.

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