Creating object-oriented designs from legacy FORTRAN code

ECOOP 2013 – Object-Oriented Programming

Nordio

et al. 2013

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.

Section: Reengineering Of Legacy Systemsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Really Automatic Scalable Object-Oriented Reengineering

ECOOP 2013 – Object-Oriented Programming

Nordio

et al. 2013

“…{ char * secret = "This is secret! "; if (argc >1) printf(argv [1]); return 0; } If we call it with: ./example "{Stack: %x%x%x%x%x%x} --> %s", we get the output {stack: 0b7[. .…”

Section: Safety and Debuggabilitymentioning

confidence: 99%

C to O-O Translation: Beyond the Easy Stuff

2012 19th Working Conference on Reverse Engineering

Nordio

et al. 2012

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

“…Industrial practices have long encompassed the manual, systematic translation of legacy code to new languages. More recently, researchers proposed semi-automated translation for widely-used legacy programming languages such as COBOL [2,14], Fortran-77 [1,21], and C [23]. Other progress in this line has come from integrating domain-specific knowledge [6], and testing and visualization techniques [18] to help develop the translations.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Automated Translation of Java Source Code to Eiffel

Manuel

Objects, Models, Components, Patterns

et al. 2011

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.