XOgastan: XML-oriented gcc AST analysis and transformations

Software maintenance, program analysis and transformation tools almost always rely on static source code analysis as the first and fundamental step to gather information. In the past, two different strategies have been adopted to develop tool suites. There are tools encompassing or implementing the source parse step, where the parser is internal to the toolkit, developed and maintained with it. A different approach builds tools on the top of external, already available, components such as compilers that output the abstract syntax tree, or make it available via an API. We present an approach and a tool, XOgastan, developed exploiting the gcc/g++ ability to save a representation of the intermediate abstract syntax tree into a file. XOgastan translates the gcc/g++ format into a graph exchange language representation, thus taking advantage of the high number of currently available XML tools for the subsequent analysis phases. The tool is illustrated and its design is discussed, showing its architecture and the main implementation choices.