Annotation support for generic patches

Abstract

In large projects parallelization of existing programs or refactoring of source code is time consuming as well as error-prone and would benefit from tool support. However, existing automatic transformation systems are not extensively used because they either require tedious definitions of source code transformations or they lack general adaptability. In our approach, a programmer changes code inside a project, resulting in before and after source code versions. The difference (the generated transformation) is stored in a database. When presented with some arbitrary code, our tool mines the database to determine which of the generalized transformations possibly apply. Our system is different from a pure compiler based (semantics preserving) approach as we only suggest code modifications. Our contribution is a set of generalizing annotations that we have found by analyzing recurring patterns in open source projects. We show the usability of our system and the annotations by finding matches and applying generated transformations in real-world applications.