Language-Independent Reference Checking in Software Product Lines

kaestner@cs.cmu.edu (S. Apel, W. Scholz, C. Lengauer, C. Kästner)
Fri, 10 Jan 2025 13:48:21 GMT

Sven Apel, Wolfgang Scholz, Christian Lengauer, and Christian Kästner. Language-Independent Reference Checking in Software Product Lines. In Proceedings of the 2nd International Workshop on Feature-Oriented Software Development (FOSD), ISBN 978-1-4503-0208-1, pages 64--71, New York, NY: ACM Press, October 2010.

Feature-Oriented Software Development (FOSD) is a paradigm for the development of software product lines. A challenge in FOSD is to guarantee that all software systems of a software product line are correct. Recent work on type checking product lines can provide a guarantee of type correctness without generating all possible systems. We generalize previous results by abstracting from the specifics of particular programming languages. In a first attempt, we present a reference-checking algorithm that performs key tasks of product-line type checking independently of the target programming language. Experiments with two sample product lines written in Java and C are encouraging and give us confidence that this approach is promising.