Using static analysis to support variability implementation decisions in C++
Samer Al Masri, Sarah Nadi, Matthew Gaudet, Xiaoli Liang, Robert W. Young · 2018
Eclipse OMR is an open-source C++ framework for building robust language runtimes. The OMR toolkit includes a dynamic Just-In-Time (JIT) compiler, a garbage collector, a platform abstraction library, and a set of developer tooling capabilities. To support the diverse languages and architectures targeted by the framework, OMR's variability implementation uses a combination of build-system variability and static polymorphism. That is, all implementation classes that depend on the selected language and architecture are decided at compile time. However, OMR developers now realize that the current variability design decision, specifically the static polymorphism implementation, has its drawbacks. They are considering using dynamic polymorphism instead of static polymorphism. Before making such a fundamental design change, however, it is crucial to collect function information and overload/override statistics about the current variability in the code base.