Reusable Parser Generation from Open Source Compilers

Many Open Source Software (called OSS) projects have been proposed and many software developers have contributed to develop software by OSS style. In the OSS development style, the source code is opened to the public and checked by the distributed software developers to improve the quality. The source code is, however, not effectively used to improve the productivity of other software development. This paper describes reusable parser generation from the source code of popular open source compilers. In construction of code analyzers or reverse engineering tools, the parser development is a time-consuming task. To improve the productivity of the task, a renewal parser generator MJay was developed. MJay generates grammar definitions and some utility programs. It is useful to construct software tools to analyze source code. Based on my experiences to construct software tools to generate UML diagrams from source code, there are three approaches to develop the parser.