An EMF-like UML generator for C++

Abstract

Model-driven architecture is a well-known approach for the development of complex software systems. The most famous tool chain is provided by Eclipse with the tools of the Eclipse modeling project. Like Eclipse itself, these tools are based on Java. However, there are numerous legacy software packages written in C++, which often use only an implicit meta-model. A real C++ implementation of this meta-model would be necessary instead to be used at run time. This paper presents a generator for C++ to create the classes, meta-model packages, and factories to realize modeling, transformation, validation, and comparison of UML models. It gives an overview of its workflow and major challenges. Moreover, a comparison between Java and C++ implementations is given, considering different benchmarks.