The Spartanizer: Massive automatic refactoring

Abstract

The Spartanizer is an eclipse plugin featuring over one hundred and fifty refactoring techniques, all aimed at reducing various size complexity of the code, without changing its design, i.e., inheritance relations, modular structure, etc. Typical use case of the Spartanizer is in an automatic mode: refactoring operations are successively selected and applied by the tool, until the code is reshaped in spartan style (a frugal coding style minimizing the use of characters, variables, tokens, etc.). The Spartanizer demonstrates the potential of automatic refactoring: tens of thousands of transformations are applied in matter of seconds, chains of dependent applications of transformations with tens of operations in them, significant impact on code size, and extent reaching almost every line of code, even of professional libraries.