DMS Software Reengineering Toolkit
The DMS Software Reengineering Toolkit[1] is a set of program transformation tools available for automating custom source program analysis, modification, translation or generation of software systems for arbitrary mixtures of source languages for large scale software systems.
DMS has been used to implement a wide variety of practical tools, include domain specific languages (such as code generation for factory control), test coverage and profiling tools, clone detection[2], language migration tools, and C++ component reengineering[3].
The Toolkit provides means for defining language grammars and will produce parsers which automatically construct abstract syntax trees (ASTs), and prettyprinters to convert original or modified ASTs back into compilable source text. The parse trees capture, and the prettyprinters regenerate complete detail about the original source program, including source position, comments, radix and format of numbers, etc. to ensure that regenerated source text is as recognizable to a programmer as the original text modulo any applied transformations.
DMS uses GLR parsing technology, enabing it to handle all practical context-free grammars. Semantic predicates extend this capability to interesting non-context-free grammars (Fortran requires matching of multiple DO loops with shared CONTINUE statements by label; GLR with semantic predicates enables the DMS Fortran parser to produce ASTs for correctly nested loops as it parses).
DMS provides attribute evaluators for computing custom analyses over ASTs, such as metrics, and including special support for symbol table construction. Other program facts can be extracted by built-in control- and data- flow analysis engines, local and global pointer analysis, whole-program call graph extraction, and symbolic range analysis by abstract interpretation.
Changes to ASTs can be accomplished by both procedural methods coded in PARLANSE and rule driven surface-syntax tree transformations, conditioned by any of the extracted program facts. The rule engine handles associative and commutative rules.
A complete example of a language definition and source-to-source transformation rules defined and applied is shown using high school Algebra and a bit of Calculus as a domain-specific language.
It has a variety of predefined language front ends, covering most real dialects of C and C++, C#, Java, Python, PHP, Fortran, COBOL, Visual Basic, Verilog, VHDL and some 20+ other languages. Predefined languages enable customizers to immediately focus on their reengineering task rather than on the details of the languages to be processed.
DMS is additionally unusual in being implemented in a parallel programming language, PARLANSE, that uses symmetric multiprocessors available on commodity workstations. This enables DMS to provide faster answers for large system analyses and conversions.
DMS was originally motivated by a theory for maintaining designs of software called Design Maintenance Systems.[4]
(DMS and "Design Maintenance System" are registered trademarks of Semantic Designs)
External links
 | This article includes a list of references, related reading, or external links, but its sources remain unclear because it lacks inline citations. (September 2010) |
- DMS Software Reengineering Toolkit main web page
- Invited Google TechTalk: DMS: Software Tool Infrastructure (video)
- Modernization of B-2 Spirit Bomber Software Systems obliquely referenced by
References
- ^ DMS: Program Transformations for Practical Scalable Software Evolution. Proceedings International Conference on Software Engineering 2004 Reprint
- ^ Clone Detection Using Abstract Syntax Trees. Proceedings International Conference on Software Maintenance 1998
- ^ Case study: Re-engineering C++ component models via automatic program transformation. Information and Software Technology 2007
- ^ Design Maintenance Systems. Communications of the ACM 1992Reprint