From software extensions to product lines of dataflow programs

Abstract Dataflow programs are widely used. Each program is a directed graph where nodes are computations and edges indicate the flow of data. In prior work, we reverse-engineered legacy dataflow programs by deriving their optimized implementations from a simple specification graph using graph transformations called refinements and optimizations. In MDE-speak, our derivations were PIM-to-PSM mappings. In this paper, we show how extensions complement refinements, optimizations, and PIM-to-PSM derivations to make the process of reverse engineering complex legacy dataflow programs tractable. We explain how optional functionality in transformations can be encoded, thereby enabling us to encode product lines of transformations as well as product lines of dataflow programs. We describe the implementation of extensions in the ReFlO tool and present two non-trivial case studies as evidence of our work’s generality

We gratefully acknowledge helpful feedback from B. Marker (U. Texas), and from the anonymous reviewers. Rui Gonçalves and João Sobral are funded by ERDF – European Regional Development Fund through the COMPETE Programme (operational programme for competitiveness) and by National Funds through the FCT – Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology) within projects FCOMP01-0124-FEDER-010152, FCOMP-01-0124-FEDER-011413 and UID/CEC/00319/2013. Rui Gonçalves is additionally funded by FCT grant SFRH/BD/47800/2008. We also gratefully acknowledge support for this work by NSF grants CCF-0724979, CCF-1421211, and OCI-1148125.