Component design of retargetable program analysis tools that reuse intermediate representations

Interactive program analysis tools are often tailored to one particular representation of programs, making adaptation to a new language costly. One way to ease adaptability is to introduce an intermediate abstraction-an adaptation layer-between an existing language representation and the program analysis tool. This adaptation layer translates the tool´s queries into queries on the particular representation. Our experiments with this approach on the StarTool program analysis tool resulted in low-cost retargets for C, Tcl/Tk, and Ada. Required adjustments to the approach, however, led to insights for improving a client´s retargetability. First, retargeting was eased by having our tool import a tool-centric (i.e.,client-centric) interface rather than a general-purpose, language-neutral representation interface. Second, our adaptation layer exports two interfaces, a representation interface supporting queries on the represented program and a language interface that the client queries to configure itself suitably for the given language. Straightforward object-oriented extensions enhance reuse and ease the development of multilanguage tools