Can we refactor conditional compilation into aspects?

Systems software uses conditional compilation to manage crosscutting concerns in a very fine-grained and efficient way, but at the expense of tangled and scattered conditional code. Refactoring of conditional compilation into aspects gets rid of these issues, but it is not clear yet for which patterns of conditional compilation aspects make sense and whether or not current aspect technology is able to express these patterns. To investigate these two problems, this paper presents a graphical “preprocessor blueprint” model which offers a queryable representation of the syntactical interaction of conditional compilation and the source code. A case study on the Parrot VM shows that preprocessor blueprints are able to express and query for the four commonly known patterns of conditional compilation usage, and that they allow to discover seven additional important patterns. By correlating each pattern’s potential for refactoring into advice and each pattern’s evolution of the numb...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: AOSD
• Authors: Bram Adams, Wolfgang De Meuter, Herman Tromp, Ahmed E. Hassan
• Keywords: AOSD 2009, Conditional Compilation, Conditional Compilation Aspects, Software Engineering, Uses Conditional Compilation