Is there any library/tool for formal specification in C++, such as JML for Java, and Data Contracts in C#?
EDIT:
I am not looking for something more specific than, it's practical to use and adds some value/quality.
EDIT2:
I am not looking for UML tools, please see the examples I have provided.
IBM Rational Rose UML software generates C++ code according to the complete UML model.
Never ever used it though, not really I mean. Just a brief look and only at UML functionalities.
Have a look at Larch/C++ : Larch/C++ Reference Manual
frama-c - fascinating, jml inspired, i keep trying to use it but can't make the time - specific to c i believe. but should at least provide pointers to find c++ tools
If you're looking for a simple tool to do UML without a fuss, StarUML is an open source (Windows only) project. I've used IBM Rational Rose and Microsoft Visio (with UML extension) and I have to say StarUML is just so nicely done.
I've never tried anything else than the class diagrams, and my experience is mainly for informal specifications and small projects. It also has some code generation features, but I've never tried them.
Related
The ADA rules for the Code Generation of Rhapsody by default, as far as I'm understanding it, relies on this java proyect <Rhapsody Instalation path\Sodius\RiA_CG\compiled_rules\RiA_CG.jar>
I have a big problem as I need to model an statechart and the generated code contains some bindings to OXF framework. I don't want to depend on a library that I don't know, I don't know how it behaves and I don't know its maintenance.
I have been spending weeks reading about customizing code generation in Rhapsody using RulesComposer, but the official documentation is like a recipe, you follow tones of steps but what you are doing is not really explained.
If someone can share me a video or a a link to a good explanation about it, even if it is not for the ADA language, I would be very grateful.
I am trying to understand a C++ codebase. I have used some free tools that will scan the code and produce diagrams, but they are not so easy to understand.
What I think would be useful is to manually construct something assisted by the UML tool.
What i need is to create something that looks like the data structure at run-time. Ideally by pulling objects from the UML and arranging them. Also I would like to organise the classes in sub-packages - like those close to the DB, or towards the branches of the datastructures.
(I am partly doing this now with Folders in the Visual Studio Solution explorer)
This is a LINUX project with many Makesfiles, but many tools like Visual Studio, "understands" the code when I just create projects with the files in the main directory of the exe I am working on
Most tools will only give you a structural view (classes and packages), which honestly doesn't tell you that much of what goes on in runtime.
Enterprise Architect from Sparx Systems incorporates a Visual Execution Analyzer, which can generate sequence diagrams from a debug session. It supports C++ but only on Windows so you'd have to rebuild, but if I understand you correctly you've already got your code running in Visual Studio.
Here's a brief demo (in this case the code is in C#, but they do claim to support C++ as well). This isn't a full-roundtrip, write-the-code-in-UML kind of thing, but personally I think that's a pipe dream anyway. Use UML to document, use a programming language to code.
Honestly, you might have substantial problems getting anything useful out of a UML tool with regard to reverse generating code.
If the code is unusually clean and had a decent OO design, good containment, inheritance, and few associations theres a chance that it might look alright... but with most real projects, when you reverse generate into UML, the resulting diagrams are a spidery mess that will probably do more harm than good.
If you are going to stick with the reverse-model genreation though, try and configure the UML utility to show less items - keep it to the key relationships like aggregation and inheritance. When you start showing uses relationships rather than contains/aggregation relationships then everything tends to connect to everything unless the project was very well written, and that will just lead to more confusion and micsonceptions.
My best recommendation would be - if the tool makes it look incomprehensible, save yourself some time and do it yourself.
UML and C++ code that wasn't generated from UML don't play together that nicely. Especially as soon as templates are involved you might get into more trouble then you would actually like and you need to ask yourself if the time spent into getting those models isn't actually better invested in good old-fashioned source code reading. You will have to read the code eventually to understand what it does so just get started now.
Didn't understand if it's linux or windows (you say linux, but then say you're using visual studio).
If you want to understand the code, Source Insight is a good tool for that. Not necessarily UMLs, but produces nice graphs in real time.
I'm reading "Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable OOSW". In chapter two, the authors provide a case study of an editor they refer to as Lexi, which seems to be written in C++. I've looked around everywhere, but the only useful link I could find said this:
The Gof tell us in a note that Lexi is
based on "Doc, a text editing
application developed by Calder". But
this paper only outlines an editor,
without any source. And I even believe
today that Lexi never truly existed as
a program.
The link provides Delphi source. I'm after C++, cause that's what I'm comfortable with, and that's what's used in the book.
Does anybody know where I can find C++ source for Lexi? If the original never existed, it would be good to find something that I can use as a base. I really don't feel like writing my own text editor from scratch just so I can work through the case study in this book.
Doc was developed using the InterViews UI toolkit. I believe that doc source is part of the InterViews distribution. Doc was used to typeset Paul's thesis. (Paul Calder was my lecturer at Flinders University)
If you look at the InterViews code you might be surprised. It was developed before modern C++ existed. For example, there are no templates. And there are no comments in the code.
To my understanding, Lexi never existed. It was created as an example for the book by GoF.
Maybe a Java implementation can help, being it more similar to c++. Here it is:
jexieditor - A WYSIWYG editor based on JavaSE. I have not had a look at the code yet, anyway
I may be showing my age here but are you sure about C++? I have a funny feeling that when that book came out originally it may have been oriented toward Smalltalk. Its just something nagging at the back of my mind, I can't substantiate it I'm afraid
I'm currently implementing Lexi analog, pls take a look https://github.com/romaonishuk/LexI. Implementation is still in progress, but most of the described in GoF patterns and concepts are implemented using C++.
This is the code source of LEXI, written in Delphi unfortunately for you: LEXI sources.
It appears that the source code might be on the CD-ROM version of Design Patterns that came out in 1998. According to the Amazon listing, the CD contains (among other things):
Sample code demonstrating pattern implementation
Furthermore,
All patterns are compiled from real-world examples and include code that demonstrates how they may be implemented in object-oriented programming languages such as C++ and Smalltalk. Readers who already own the book will want the CD to take advantage of its dynamic search mechanism and ready-to-install patterns.
Whether these code samples include the full Lexi source is impossible to tell from the listing, and the current price of the CD (£86.87) is rather high. But it might be worth checking if any local libraries have the CD in stock.
I was just trying to find out if a real working Lexi version exists, to have a concrete reference, but I didn't find it.
I found this Java version on GitHub: https://github.com/AmitDutta/lexi
I don't know, maybe it could be useful for someone's purpose here.
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What are some good tools for getting a quick start for parsing and analyzing C/C++ code?
In particular, I'm looking for open source tools that handle the C/C++ preprocessor and language. Preferably, these tools would use lex/yacc (or flex/bison) for the grammar, and not be too complicated. They should handle the latest ANSI C/C++ definitions.
Here's what I've found so far, but haven't looked at them in detail (thoughts?):
CScope - Old-school C analyzer. Doesn't seem to do a full parse, though. Described as a glorified 'grep' for finding C functions.
GCC - Everybody's favorite open source compiler. Very complicated, but seems to do it all. There's a related project for creating GCC extensions called GEM, but hasn't been updated since GCC 4.1 (2006).
PUMA - The PUre MAnipulator. (from the page: "The intention of this project is to
provide a library of classes for the analysis and manipulation of C/C++ sources. For this
purpose PUMA provides classes for scanning, parsing and of course manipulating C/C++
sources."). This looks promising, but hasn't been updated since 2001. Apparently PUMA has been incorporated into AspectC++, but even this project hasn't been updated since 2006.
Various C/C++ raw grammars. You can get c-c++-grammars-1.2.tar.gz, but this has been unmaintained since 1997. A little Google searching pulls up other basic lex/yacc grammars that could serve as a starting place.
Any others?
I'm hoping to use this as a starting point for translating C/C++ source into a new toy language.
Thanks!
-Matt
(Added 2/9): Just a clarification: I want to extract semantic information from the preprocessor in addition to the C/C++ code itself. I don't want "#define foo 42" to disappear into the integer "42", but remain attached to the name "foo". This, unfortunately, excludes several solutions that run the preprocessor first and only deliver the C/C++ parse tree)
Parsing C++ is extremely hard because the grammar is undecidable. To quote Yossi Kreinin:
Outstandingly complicated grammar
"Outstandingly" should be interpreted literally, because all popular languages have context-free (or "nearly" context-free) grammars, while C++ has undecidable grammar. If you like compilers and parsers, you probably know what this means. If you're not into this kind of thing, there's a simple example showing the problem with parsing C++: is AA BB(CC); an object definition or a function declaration? It turns out that the answer depends heavily on the code before the statement - the "context". This shows (on an intuitive level) that the C++ grammar is quite context-sensitive.
You can look at clang that uses llvm for parsing.
Support C++ fully now link
The ANTLR parser generator has a grammar for C/C++ as well as the preprocessor. I've never used it so I can't say how complete its parsing of C++ is going to be. ANTLR itself has been a useful tool for me on a couple of occasions for parsing much simpler languages.
Depending on your problem GCCXML might be your answer.
Basically it parses the source using GCC and then gives you easily digestible XML of parse tree.
With GCCXML you are done once and for all.
pycparser is a complete parser for C (C99) written in Python. It has a fully configurable AST backend, so it's being used as a basis for any kind of language processing you might need.
Doesn't support C++, though. Granted, it's much harder than C.
Update (2012): at this time the answer, without any doubt, would be Clang - it's modular, supports the full C++ (with many C++-11 features) and has a relatively friendly code base. It also has a C API for bindings to high-level languages (i.e. for Python).
Have a look at how doxygen works, full source code is available and it's flex-based.
A misleading candidate is GOLD which is a free Windows-based parser toolkit explicitly for creating translators. Their list of supported languages refers to the languages in which one can implement parsers, not the list of supported parse grammars.
They only have grammars for C and C#, no C++.
Parsing C++ is a very complex challenge.
There's the Boost/Spirit framework, and a couple of years ago they did play with the idea of implementing a C++ parser, but it's far from complete.
Fully and properly parsing ISO C++ is far from trivial, and there were in fact many related efforts. But it is an inherently complex job that isn't easily accomplished, without rewriting a full compiler frontend understanding all of C++ and the preprocessor. A pre-processor implementation called "wave" is available from the Spirit folks.
That said, you might want to have a look at pork/oink (elsa-based), which is a C++ parser toolkit specifically meant to be used for source code transformation purposes, it is being used by the Mozilla project to do large-scale static source code analysis and automated code rewriting, the most interesting part is that it not only supports most of C++, but also the preprocessor itself!
On the other hand there's indeed one single proprietary solution available: the EDG frontend, which can be used for pretty much all C++ related efforts.
Personally, I would check out the elsa-based pork/oink suite which is used at Mozilla, apart from that, the FSF has now approved work on gcc plugins using the runtime library license, thus I'd assume that things are going to change rapidly, once people can easily leverage the gcc-based C++ parser for such purposes using binary plugins.
So, in a nutshell: if you the bucks: EDG, if you need something free/open source now: else/oink are fairly promising, if you have some time, you might want to use gcc for your project.
Another option just for C code is cscout.
The grammar for C++ is sort of notoriously hairy. There's a good thread at Lambda about it, but the gist is that C++ grammar can require arbitrarily much lookahead.
For the kind of thing I imagine you might be doing, I'd think about hacking either Gnu CC, or Splint. Gnu CC in particular does separate out the language generation part pretty thoroughly, so you might be best off building a new g++ backend.
Actually, PUMA and AspectC++ are still both actively maintained and updated. I was looking into using AspectC++ and was wondering about the lack of updates myself. I e-mailed the author who said that both AspectC++ and PUMA are still being developed. You can get to source code through SVN https://svn.aspectc.org/repos/ or you can get regular binary builds at http://akut.aspectc.org. As with a lot of excellent c++ projects these days, the author doesn't have time to keep up with web page maintenance. Makes sense if you've got a full time job and a life.
how about something easier to comprehend like tiny-C or Small C
Elsa beats everything else I know hands down for C++ parsing, even though it is not 100% compliant. I'm a fan. There's a module that prints out C++, so that may be a good starting point for your toy project.
See our C++ Front End
for a full-featured C++ parser: builds ASTs, symbol tables, does name
and type resolution. You can even parse and retain the preprocessor
directives. The C++ front end is built on top of our DMS Software Reengineering
Toolkit, which allows you to use that information to carry out arbitrary
source code changes using source-to-source transformations.
DMS is the ideal engine for implementing such a translator.
Having said that, I don't see much point in your imagined task; I don't
see much value in trying to replace C++, and you'll find building
a complete translator an enormous amount of work, especially if your
target is a "toy" language. And there is likely little point in
parsing C++ using a robust parser, if its only purpose is to produce
an isomorphic version of C++ that is easier to parse (wait, we postulated
a robust C++ already!).
EDIT May 2012: DMS's C++ front end now handles GCC3/GCC4/C++11,Microsoft VisualC 2005/2010. Robustly.
EDIT Feb 2015: Now handles C++14 in GCC and MS dialects.
EDIT August 2015: Now parses and captures both the code and the preprocessor directives in a unified tree.
EDIT May 2020: Has been doing C++17 for the past few years. C++20 in process.
A while back I attempted to write a tool that will automatically generate unit tests for c files.
For preprosessing I put the files thru GCC. The output is ugly but you can easily trace where in the original code from the preprocessed file. But for your needs you might need somthing else.
I used Metre as the base for a C parser. It is open source and uses lex and yacc. This made it easy to get up and running in a short time without fully understanding lex & yacc.
I also wrote a C app since the lex & yacc solution could not help me trace functionality across functions and parse the structure of the entire function in one pass. It became unmaintainable in a short time and was abandoned.
What about using a tool like GNU's CFlow, that can analyse the code and produce charts of call-graphs, here's what the opengroup(man page) has to say about cflow. The GNU version of cflow comes with source, and open source also ...
Hope this helps,
Best regards,
Tom.
A rather comprehensive site explaining the difficulties and solutions involved in using a dll written in c/c++ and the conversion of the .h header file to delphi/pascal was posted to a mailing list I was on recently, so I thought I'd share it, and invite others to post other useful resources for this, whether they be links, conversion tools, or book/paper titles.
One resource per answer please, so we'll end up with the most popular/best resources bubbling to the top.
Over at Rudy's Delphi Corner, he has an excellent article about the pitfalls of converting C/C++ to Delphi. In my opinion, this is essential information when attempting this task. Here is the description:
This article is meant for everyone who
needs to translate C/C++ headers to
Delphi. I want to share some of the
pitfalls you can encounter when
converting from C or C++. This article
is not a tutorial, just a discussion
of frequently encountered problem
cases. It is meant for the beginner as
well as for the more experienced
translator of C and C++.
He also wrote a "Conversion Helper Package" that installs into the Delphi IDE which aids in converting C/C++ code to Delphi:
(source: rvelthuis.de)
His other relevant articles on this topic include:
Using C++ Objects in Delphi
Using C object files in Delphi
Article at Rudy's Delphi Corner
Also, CodeGear hosts a rudimentary translation tool called CToPas (written by Ural Gunaydin).
I would like to highlight the Jedi Api Library, it is the Delphi translation of the Windows SDK headers. Might save you a lot of work if you need to translate headers from the SDK and is of course a good sample of conversions!
Since FreePascal is aimed at Delphi compatibiltiy among other things, i think H2Pas may be helpful too.
https://www.freepascal.org/tools/h2pas.var
HeadConv from DrBob is used quite a lot too, although I concur with Graza that manual translation is best.
use this option so the byte alignment is the same as C/C++ and then you don't need to add padding bytes in structs.
{$MINENUMSIZE 4}