A variability-aware module system

  • Authors:

  • Christian Kästner;Klaus Ostermann;Sebastian Erdweg

  • Affiliations:

  • Philipps University of Marburg, Marburg, Germany;Philipps University Marburg, Marburg, Germany;Philipps University Marburg, Marburg, Germany

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the ACM international conference on Object oriented programming systems languages and applications
  • Year:
  • 2012

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Abstract

Module systems enable a divide and conquer strategy to software development. To implement compile-time variability in software product lines, modules can be composed in different combinations. However, this way, variability dictates a dominant decomposition. As an alternative, we introduce a variability-aware module system that supports compile-time variability inside a module and its interface. So, each module can be considered a product line that can be type checked in isolation. Variability can crosscut multiple modules. The module system breaks with the antimodular tradition of a global variability model in product-line development and provides a path toward software ecosystems and product lines of product lines developed in an open fashion. We discuss the design and implementation of such a module system on a core calculus and provide an implementation for C as part of the TypeChef project. Our implementation supports variability inside modules from #ifdef preprocessor directives and variable linking at the composition level. With our implementation, we type check all configurations of all modules of the open source product line Busybox with 811~compile-time options, perform linker check of all configurations, and report found type and linker errors -- without resorting to a brute-force strategy.