Abstraction of Functional Modules from a Legacy ‘C’ Program using Program Slicing

Abstract

The present computation industry is growing very fast. Lot of improvements have taken place, as a result of which high speed computation with inbuilt parallel computation is the emerging technology for many of the parallel or multicore processors. Thus this technology is replacing the earlier technologies of sequential computation, leaving very little scope for the sequentially executing programs and their supporting software systems. These systems can neither utilize the modern computing resources nor scale upto their demands. Also, in contrary to the modern computational systems, the sequential executing legacy software systems are the systems which are a result of continuous developmental work of many developers embedding valuable mission critical functionalities. These systems have thus become the major working resources of the organizations but lack the capacity to adopt to the advanced hardware computation domains. Hence it is difficult for the organizations to disown these legacy systems or to maintain them. Thus a framework is required for bridging the gap between the advanced computation systems and the legacy systems. This paper proposes a methodology for abstraction of functionalities from the legacy ‘C’ program using the technique of program slicing.