Fusing a Transformation Language with an Open Compiler

Together with Eelco Visser, I got a paper (two actually, see the other post) accepted to this year's Workshop on Language Descriptions, Tools and Applications, which is held in Braga Portugal. My visit to IBM Research last summer started me thinking about a good way to integrate existing compiler frontends with Stratego/XT. This is the result, and I think it turned out quite well.

Transformation systems such as Stratego/XT provide powerful analysis and transformation frameworks and concise languages for language processing, but instantiating them for every subject language is an arduous task, most often resulting in half-completed frontends. Open compilers, like the Eclipse Compiler for Java, provide mature frontends with robust parsers and type checkers, but solving language processing problems in general purpose languages without transformation libraries is tedious. Reusing these frontends with existing transformation systems is therefore attractive. However, for this reuse to be optimal, the functional logic found in the frontend should be exposed to the transformation system -- simple data serialization of the abstract syntax tree is not enough, as this fails to expose important compiler functionality, such as import graphs, symbol tables and the type checker.

In this paper, we introduce a scriptable analysis and transformation framework for Java built on top of the Eclipse Java compiler. The framework consists of an adapter extracted from the abstract syntax tree of the compiler, and an interpreter for the Stratego language. The adapter allows the Stratego interpreter to rewrite directly on the compiler AST. We illustrate the applicability of our system with scripts written in Stratego that perform framework and library-specific analyses and transformations.

(pdf, bib)

The prototype code is already available in the Spoofax SVN repo, but I will clean it up and make a separate release once I get a bit of breathing space from my thesis writing.