Dms Software Reengineering Toolkit Software Engineering Tasks

Additionally, compiler design impacts several other areas of computer science.

Almost all high-performance systems take advantage of the same two basic techniques: parallelism and memory hierarchies.

That has changed.

Since programming in high-level languages is the norm, the performance of a computer system is determined not by its raw speed but also by how well compilers can exploit its features.

Thus, in modern computer architecture development, compilers are developed in the processor-design stage, and compiled code, running on simulators, is used to evaluate the proposed architectural features.

The following are some of the important applications of program-translation techniques.

As a result, errors are rampant in programs; errors may crash a system, produce wrong results, render a system.

Data-flow analysis can find errors along all the possible execution paths, and not just those exercised by the input data sets, as in the case of program testing.

Dms Software Reengineering Toolkit Software Engineering Tasks

Many of the data-flow-analysis techniques, originally developed for compiler optimizations, can be used to create tools that assist programmers in their software engineering tasks.

A data-flow analysis may be designed to warn the programmers of all possible statements with a particular category of errors.

But if most of these warnings are false alarms, users will not use the tool.

Thus, practical error detectors are often neither sound nor complete.

That is, they may not find all the errors in the program, and not all errors reported are guaranteed to be real errors.

Nonetheless, various static analyses have been developed and shown to be effective in finding errors, such as dereferencing null or freed pointers, in real programs.

The fact that error detectors may be unsound makes them significantly different from compiler optimizations.

Optimizers must be conservative and cannot alter the semantics of the program under any circumstances.

Of special importance are techniques that detect statically when a program might have a security vulnerability.

Automatic memory management obliterates all memory-management errors (e.g., memory leaks), which are a major source of problems in C and C programs.

Various tools have been developed to help programmers find memory management errors.

For example, Purify is a widely used tool that dynamically catches memory management errors as they occur.

Tools that help identify some of these problems statically have also been developed.