Parsing Variant C Code: An Evaluation on Automotive Software

Abstract

Software product lines are often implemented using the C preprocessor. Different features are selected based on macros; the corresponding code is activated or deactivated using #if. Unfortunately, C preprocessor constructs are not parseable in general, since they break the syntactical structure of C code [1]. This imposes a severe limitation on software analyses: They usually cannot be performed on unpreprocessed C code. In this paper, we will discuss how and to what extent large parts of the unpreprocessed code can be parsed anyway, and what the results can be used for.