Check Pointer is a memory access validator for checking spatial and temporal pointer usage errors in multi-threaded applications by tracking meta data and validating pointer dereferences at run-time. The tool uses source-to source transformations implemented with DMS to instrument the source code of the application to be validated with meta data checks. Libraries available only in binary form are handled by using function wrappers that check meta data immediately before calling a library function and update meta data as necessary immediately after the library function returns.

While a number of research systems have demonstrated the potential value of program transformations, very few of these systems have made it into practice. The core technology for such systems is well understood; what remains is integration and more importantly, the problem of handling the scale of the applications to be processed. This paper describes DMS, a practical, commercial program analysis and transformation system, and sketches a variety of tasks to which it has been applied, from redocumenting to large-scale system migration. Its success derives partly from a vision of design maintenance and the construction of infrastructure that appears necessary to support that vision. DMS handles program scale by careful space management, computational scale via parallelism and knowledge acquisition scale via domains.

Automated program transformation holds promise for a variety of software life cycle endeavors, particularly where the size of legacy systems makes code analysis, re-engineering, and evolution very difficult and expensive. But constructing transformation tools that handle the full generality of modern languages and that scale to very large applications is itself a painstaking and expensive process. This cost can be managed by developing a common transformation system infrastructure that is re-used by an array of derived tools that each address specific tasks, thus leveraging the infrastructure cost over the various tools.This talk describes DMS, a practical, commercial program analysis and transformation system, and discusses how its infrastructure was employed to construct the Boeing Migration Tool (BMT), a custom component modernization application being applied to a large C++ industrial avionics system. The BMT automatically transforms components developed under a 1990's era component style to a more modern CORBA-like component framework, preserving functionality. We describe the DMS infrastructure and the BMT application itself, illustrating some of the kinds of syntheses and transformations required and some of the issues involved with transforming industrial C++ code. We also discuss the development experience, including the strategies for approaching the scale of the migration, the style of interaction that evolved between the tool-building company and its industrial customer, and how the project adapted to changing requirements.