CScout: A refactoring browser for C

Despite its maturity and popularity, the C programming language still lacks tool support for reliably performing even simple refactoring, browsing, or analysis operations. This is primarily due to identifier scope complications introduced by the C preprocessor. The CScout refactoring browser analyses complete program families by tagging the original identifiers with their precise location and classifying them into equivalence classes orthogonal to the C language’s namespace and scope extents. A web-based user interface provides programmers with an intuitive source code analysis and navigation front-end, while an sql-based back-end allows more complex source code analysis and manipulation. CScout has been successfully applied to many medium and large-sized proprietary and open-source projects identifying thousands of modest refactoring opportunities.