Semi-automatic update of applications in response to library changes

Software libraries provide leverage in large part because they are used by many applications. As Parnas, Lampson and others have noted, stable interfaces to libraries isolate the application from changes in the libraries. That is, as long as there is no change in a library’s syntax or semantics, applications can use updated libraries simply by importing and linking the new version. However, libraries are indeed changed from time to time and the tedious work of adapting the application source to the library interface changes becomes a burden to multitudes of programmers. This paper introduces an approach and a toolset intended to reduce these costs. Specifically, in our approach a library maintainer annotates changed functions with rules that are used to generate tools that will update the applications that use the updated libraries. Thus, in exchange for a small added amount of work by the library maintainers, costs to each application maintainer can be reduced. We present the basic approach, describe the tools that support the approach, and discuss the strengths and limitations of the approach.