A Framework for Reverse Engineering Large C++ Code Bases

  • Authors:

  • Alexandru Telea;Heorhiy Byelas;Lucian Voinea

  • Affiliations:

  • Institute for Mathematics and Computing Science, University of Groningen, the Netherlands;Institute for Mathematics and Computing Science, University of Groningen, the Netherlands;SolidSource BV, Eindhoven, the Netherlands

  • Venue:
  • Electronic Notes in Theoretical Computer Science (ENTCS)
  • Year:
  • 2009

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Abstract

When assessing the quality and maintainability of large C++ code bases, tools are needed for extracting several facts from the source code, such as: architecture, structure, code smells, and quality metrics. Moreover, these facts should be presented in such ways so that one can correlate them and find outliers and anomalies. We present SolidFX, an integrated reverse-engineering environment (IRE) for C and C++. SolidFX was specifically designed to support code parsing, fact extraction, metric computation, and interactive visual analysis of the results in much the same way IDEs and design tools offer for the forward engineering pipeline. In the design of SolidFX, we adapted and extended several existing code analysis and data visualization techniques to render them scalable for handling code bases of millions of lines. In this paper, we detail several design decisions taken to construct SolidFX. We also illustrate the application of our tool and our lessons learnt in using it in several types of analyses of real-world industrial code bases, including maintainability and modularity assessments, detection of coding patterns, and complexity analyses.