The Design and Evaluation of an Interoperable Translation System for Object-Oriented Software Reuse

In this paper, we address the problem of defining a source-to-source translation system for reusable software components. We design an interoperable language for writing software components, and present a system to translate components written in the interoperable language to a set of compatible target languages. We analyze the common features in a set of popular programming languages to inform the design of our interoperable language. We evaluate the utility of our system by using our source-to-source translator to convert two well-known open source Java libraries to C++ and Python, and assess the accuracy and performance of the resulting translation.