Language-independent reference checking in software product lines

Abstract

Feature-Oriented Software Development (FOSD) is a paradigm for the development of software product lines. A challenge in FOSD is to guarantee that all software systems of a software product line are correct. Recent work on type checking product lines can provide a guarantee of type correctness without generating all possible systems. We generalize previous results by abstracting from the specifics of particular programming languages. In a first attempt, we present a reference-checking algorithm that performs key tasks of product-line type checking independently of the target programming language. Experiments with two sample product lines written in Java and C are encouraging and give us confidence that this approach is promising.