A heuristic-based approach to code-smell detection

Encapsulation and data hiding are central tenets of the object oriented paradigm. Deciding what data and behaviour to form into a class and where to draw the line between its public and private details can make the difference between a class that is an understandable, flexible and reusable abstraction and one which is not. This decision is a difficult one and may easily result in poor encapsulation which can then have serious implications for a number of system qualities. It is often hard to identify such encapsulation problems within large software systems until they cause a maintenance problem (which is usually too late) and attempting to perform such analysis manually can also be tedious and error prone. Two of the common encapsulation problems that can arise as a consequence of this decomposition process are data classes and god classes. Typically, these two problems occur together – data classes are lacking in functionality that has typically been sucked into an over-complicated and domineering god class. This paper describes the architecture of a tool which automatically detects data and god classes that has been developed as a plug-in for the Eclipse IDE. The technique has been evaluated in a controlled study on two large open source systems which compare the tool results to similar work by Marinescu, who employs a metrics-based approach to detecting such features. The study provides some valuable insights into the strengths and weaknesses of the two approache

Loo.py: From Fortran to performance via transformation and substitution rules

A large amount of numerically-oriented code is written and is being written in legacy languages. Much of this code could, in principle, make good use of data-parallel throughput-oriented computer architectures. Loo.py, a transformation-based programming system targeted at GPUs and general data-parallel architectures, provides a mechanism for user-controlled transformation of array programs. This transformation capability is designed to not just apply to programs written specifically for Loo.py, but also those imported from other languages such as Fortran. It eases the trade-off between achieving high performance, portability, and programmability by allowing the user to apply a large and growing family of transformations to an input program. These transformations are expressed in and used from Python and may be applied from a variety of settings, including a pragma-like manner from other languages.Comment: ARRAY 2015 - 2nd ACM SIGPLAN International Workshop on Libraries, Languages and Compilers for Array Programming (ARRAY 2015

Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Domain-Specific Language Design and Implementation (DSLDI 2015)

The goal of the DSLDI workshop is to bring together researchers and practitioners interested in sharing ideas on how DSLs should be designed, implemented, supported by tools, and applied in realistic application contexts. We are both interested in discovering how already known domains such as graph processing or machine learning can be best supported by DSLs, but also in exploring new domains that could be targeted by DSLs. More generally, we are interested in building a community that can drive forward the development of modern DSLs. These informal post-proceedings contain the submitted talk abstracts to the 3rd DSLDI workshop (DSLDI'15), and a summary of the panel discussion on Language Composition