Transforming C++11 Code to C++03 to Support Legacy Compilation Environments

Gabor Antal, David Havas, Istvan Siket, Arpad Beszedes, Rudolf Ferenc, Jozsef Mihalicza
2016 2016 IEEE 16th International Working Conference on Source Code Analysis and Manipulation (SCAM)  
Newer technologies -programming languages, environments, libraries -change very rapidly. However, various internal and external constraints often prevent projects from quickly adopting to these changes. Customers may require specific platform compatibility from a software vendor, for example. In this work, we deal with such an issue in the context of the C++ programming language. Our industrial partner is required to use SDKs that support only older C++ language editions. They, however, would
more » ... ke to allow their developers to use the newest language constructs in their code. To address this problem, we created a source code transformation framework to automatically backport source code written according to the C++11 standard to its functionally equivalent C++03 variant. With our framework developers are free to exploit the latest language features, while production code is still built by using a restricted set of available language constructs. This paper reports on the technical details of the transformation engine, and our experiences in applying it on two large industrial code bases and four open-source systems. Our solution is freely available and open-source.
doi:10.1109/scam.2016.11 dblp:conf/scam/AntalHSBFM16 fatcat:4uvteznohjfvlmaquoujc4h734