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International Andrei Ershov Memorial Conference on Perspectives of System Informatics

PSI 2019: Perspectives of System Informatics pp 140–155Cite as

Nobrainer: An Example-Driven Framework for C/C++ Code Transformations

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 11964))

Abstract

Refactoring is a standard part of any modern development cycle. It helps to reduce technical debt and keep software projects healthy. However, in many cases refactoring requires that transformations are applied globally across multiple files. Applying them manually involves large amounts of monotonous work. Nevertheless, automatic tools are severely underused because users find them unreliable, difficult to adopt, and not customizable enough.

This paper presents a new code transformation framework. It delivers an intuitive way to specify the expected outcome of a transformation applied within the whole project. The user provides simple C/C++ code snippets that serve as examples of what the code should look like before and after the transformation. Due to the absence of any additional abstractions (such as domain-specific languages), we believe this approach flattens the learning curve, making adoption easier.

Besides using the source code of the provided snippets, the framework also operates at the AST level. This gives it a deeper understanding of the program, which allows it to validate the correctness of the transformation and match the exact cases required by the user.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/no-brainer.

  2. 2.

    https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/no-brainer.

  3. 3.

    https://clang.llvm.org/.

  4. 4.

    https://clang.llvm.org/docs/JSONCompilationDatabase.html.

  5. 5.

    https://clang.llvm.org/extra/index.html.

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Acknowledgments

This work resulted from a joint project with Samsung Research. The authors of this paper are grateful to the colleagues from Samsung for their valuable ideas and feedback.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Ivannikov Institute for System Programming of the Russian Academy of Sciences, 25, Alexander Solzhenitsyn st., Moscow, 109004, Russian Federation

    Valeriy Savchenko, Konstantin Sorokin, Georgiy Pankratenko, Sergey Markov, Alexander Spiridonov & Ilia Alexandrov

  2. Lomonosov Moscow State University, GSP-1, Leninskie Gory, Moscow, 119991, Russian Federation

    Alexander Volkov

  3. Samsung Electronics, Samsung GEC, 26, Sangil-ro 6-gil, Gangdong-gu, Seoul, South Korea

    Kwangwon Sun

Authors
  1. Valeriy Savchenko
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  2. Konstantin Sorokin
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  3. Georgiy Pankratenko
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  4. Sergey Markov
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  5. Alexander Spiridonov
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  6. Ilia Alexandrov
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  7. Alexander Volkov
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  8. Kwangwon Sun
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Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Valeriy Savchenko , Konstantin Sorokin , Georgiy Pankratenko , Sergey Markov , Alexander Spiridonov , Ilia Alexandrov , Alexander Volkov or Kwangwon Sun .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Microsoft Research, Redmond, WA, USA

    Nikolaj Bjørner

  2. AP Ershov Institute of Informatics Systems, Novosibirsk, Russia

    Irina Virbitskaite

  3. School of Computer Science, University of Manchester, Manchester, UK

    Andrei Voronkov

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Savchenko, V. et al. (2019). Nobrainer: An Example-Driven Framework for C/C++ Code Transformations. In: Bjørner, N., Virbitskaite, I., Voronkov, A. (eds) Perspectives of System Informatics. PSI 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11964. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37487-7_12

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37487-7_12

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-37486-0

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-37487-7

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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