Aspectual source code analysis with GASR

Abstract

To be able to modularize crosscutting concerns, aspects introduce new programming language features, often in a new language, with a specific syntax. These new features lead to new needs for source code analysis tools, resulting in the requirement for a general-purpose aspectual source code analysis tool. Ignoring this requirement has led to a nontrivial duplication of effort in the aspect-oriented software development community. This is because all code analysis efforts that we are aware of have either built ad-hoc analysis tools or were performed manually. In this paper we present Gasr: a source code analysis tool in the tradition of logic program querying that reasons over AspectJ source code. By hooking into the IDE plugins for AspectJ, Gasr provides a library of predicates that can be used to query aspectual source code. We demonstrate the use of Gasr by automating the recognition of a number of previously identified aspectual source code assumptions. We then detect assumption instances on two well-known case studies that were manually investigated in the earlier work. In addition to finding the already known aspect assumptions, Gasr encounters assumption instances that were overlooked before.