Rejuvenating C++ programs through demacrofication
Aditya Kumar, Andrew M. Sutton, Bjarne Stroustrup · 2012
We describe how legacy C++ programs can be rejuvenated using C++11 features such as generalized constant expressions, perfect forwarding, and lambda expressions. In general, this work develops a correspondence between different kinds of macros and the C++ declarations to which they should be transformed. We have created a set of demacrofication tools to assist a developer in the rejuvenation of C++ programs. To evaluate the work, we have applied the rejuvenation tools to a number of C++ libraries to assess the extent to which these libraries might be improved by demacrofication. Results indicate that between 68 and 98% of potentially refactorable macros could be transformed into C++11 declarations. Additional experiments demonstrate why these numbers are not readily achieved using fully automated rejuvenation tools. We also discuss some techniques to further assist in automating rejuvenation process.