Toward the Automated Generation of Components from Existing Source Code

摘要

A major challenge to achieving widespread use of software component technology in scientific computing is an effective migration strategy for existing, or legacy, source code. This paper describes initial work and challenges in automating the identification and generation of components using the ROSE compiler infrastructure and the Babel language interoperability tool. Babel enables calling interfaces expressed in the Scientific Interface Definition Language (SIDL) to be implemented in, and called from, an arbitrary combination of supported languages. ROSE is used to build specialized source-to-source translators that (1) extract a SIDL interface specification from information implicit in existing C++ source code and (2) transform Babel's output to include dispatches to the legacy code.