A Program Extractor Suite for C and C + + : Choosing the Right Tool for the Job

This report describes a suite of program extractors which we developed by adopting and extending existing program parsing and extraction techniques or tools. This suite is called CX because it is mainly targeted at extracting facts from C and C++ programs. This suite is currently composed of four extractors: CPPX, BFX, LDX and CTSX. The main goal of creating CX is to provide a convenient set of program extractors that can complement each other and work in a systematic manner. The benefits of this extractor suite will be discussed in terms of two practical applications: (1) creating program comprehension pipelines to support various understanding tasks, and (2) building an open source software evolution database (EvolDB) to support empirical research on software evolution.

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