Automatic Generation of Code Analysis Tools: The CastQL Approach

Abstract

Source code analysis and manipulation tools have become an essential part of software development processes. Automating the development of such tools can heavily reduce development time, effort and cost. This paper proposes a framework for the efficient development of code analysis software. A tool for automatically generating the front end of analysis tools for a given language grammar is proposed. The proposed approach can be applied to any language that can be described using the BNF notation. The proposed framework also provides a domain specific language to concisely express queries on the internal representation generated by the front end. This language tackles the problem of writing complex code in a general purpose programming language in order to retrieve information from the internal representation. The approach has been evaluated through two different realistic usage scenarios applied to a number of different benchmark applications. The front end generator has also been tested for twenty input grammars. In all cases the software generated by the proposed framework functions according to the input grammar while the development time has been reduced on average down to 12% compared to equivalent handwritten implementations. The experimental results give evidence that the use of the proposed framework can heavily reduce the relevant design effort and cost.