C to O-O Translation: Beyond the Easy Stuff

TL;DR

This paper introduces C2Eif, an automatic source-to-source translator that converts C code into Eiffel, enabling modern features like type safety and object-orientation while maintaining functional equivalence.

Contribution

It presents a comprehensive, fully automatic translation tool supporting full C language features, including extensions and inline assembly, to produce safe, object-oriented Eiffel code.

Findings

Successfully translated large C applications like vim and libgsl

Handled complex benchmarks such as GCC torture tests

Produced functionally equivalent Eiffel code with enhanced safety

Abstract

Can we reuse some of the huge code-base developed in C to take advantage of modern programming language features such as type safety, object-orientation, and contracts? This paper presents a source-to-source translation of C code into Eiffel, a modern object-oriented programming language, and the supporting tool C2Eif. The translation is completely automatic and supports the entire C language (ANSI, as well as many GNU C Compiler extensions, through CIL) as used in practice, including its usage of native system libraries and inlined assembly code. Our experiments show that C2Eif can handle C applications and libraries of significant size (such as vim and libgsl), as well as challenging benchmarks such as the GCC torture tests. The produced Eiffel code is functionally equivalent to the original C code, and takes advantage of some of Eiffel's object-oriented features to produce safe and easy-to-debug translations.