Assembler restructuring in FermaT

Ward, Martin

doi:10.1109/scam.2013.6648196

Cited by 3 publications

(2 citation statements)

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“…FermaT is the current implementation of WSL (Wide Spectrum Language) [21]. FermaT provides a whole catalogue of semantics preserving transformations that are at the core of the system.…”

Section: Program Transformations In Fermatmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Climbing the Hill to Understand the Code

Pracner,

Ward,

Sukur

et al. 2024

IEEE Access

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Software maintenance takes up a disproportionately large amount of time in the modern software life cycle. One of the common problems is understanding the original code that is being restructured and improved and this is especially true with low-level code. This paper investigates the results and properties of an automated process that can raise the abstraction level of code from low-level operations to highlevel structures. The process is made of independent components and can be adapted to different scenarios. The automated improvements implementation relies on the program transformation system FermaT and its catalogue of semantics-preserving transformations. The process uses hill climbing and a metric for the fitness function of the programs. This component was made to work on general inputs, without explicit knowledge of the type of origin of the program. The paper explores how different inputs are actually handled by the system, what are the properties and how these can be used for further improvements. Two main types of inputs are shown, x86 assembly and MicroJava bytecode. These two have many operational differences, and the translator tools introduce some more, but nonetheless, the same process can handle all of these and, on average, improve the Structure metric (a good approximation of the complexity of the code) by around 85%.

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“…FermaT is the current implementation of WSL (Wide Spectrum Language) [21]. FermaT provides a whole catalogue of semantics preserving transformations that are at the core of the system.…”

Section: Program Transformations In Fermatmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…FermaT and WSL are successfully used by Software Migrations Ltd for migrating large, industrial assembly systems to C or COBOL, sometimes having millions of lines of code [1], [21]. The process typically involves three stages, similar to the process presented in this paper.…”

Section: Program Transformations In Fermatmentioning

confidence: 99%