Integrating the Soot Compiler Infrastructure into an IDE

This paper presents the integration of Soot, a byte-code analysis and transformation framework, with an integrated development environment (IDE), Eclipse. Such an integrated toolkit is useful for both the compiler developer, to aid in understanding and debugging new analyses, and also for the end-user of the IDE, to aid in program understanding by exposing semantic information gathered by the advanced compiler analyses. The paper discusses these advantages and provides concrete examples of its usefulness. There are several major challenges to overcome in developing the integrated toolkit, and the paper discusses three major challenges and the solutions to those challenges. An overview of Soot and the integrated toolkit is given, followed by a more detailed discussion of the fundamental components. The paper concludes with several illustrative examples of using the integrated toolkit along with a discussion of future plans and research.