DMS®: Program Transformations for Practical Scalable Software Evolution

While a number of research systems have demonstratedthe potential value of program transformations, very few ofthese systems have made it into practice. The core technologyfor such systems is well understood; what remains isintegration and more importantly, the problem of handlingthe scale of the applications to be processed.This paper describes DMS, a practical, commercialprogram analysis and transformation system, and sketchesa variety of tasks to which it has been applied, from redocumentingto large-scale system migration. Its successderives partly from a vision of design maintenance and theconstruction of infrastructure that appears necessary tosupport that vision. DMS handles program scale by carefulspace management, computational scale via parallelismand knowledge acquisition scale via domains.