Reverse Engineering Scripting Language Extensions

Software systems are often written in more than one programming language. During development, programmers need to understand not only the dependencies among code in a particular language, but dependencies that span languages. In this paper, we focus on the problem of scripting languages (such as Perl) and their extension mechanisms to calling functions with a C interface. Our general approach involves building a fact extractor for each scripting language, by hooking into the language interpreter itself. The produced facts conform to a common schema, and an analyzer is extended to recognize the cross-language dependencies. We present how these statically discovered dependencies can be represented, visualized, and explored in the Eclipse environment.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2006
• Where: IWPC
• Authors: Daniel L. Moise, Kenny Wong, H. James Hoover, Daqing Hou
• Keywords: Cross-language Dependencies, IWPC 2006, Particular Language, Scripting Language, Software Engineering