README.coding_rules

In March 2003, we made several modifications to Soot to make it better
suited to being used as a library or inside a GUI. The most significant
change was moving all global variables to a single class called G, so
that they could be reset in between different runs of Soot. In order to
maintain interoperability as a library and with GUIs, the following
coding rules have been imposed. A checker has been included which points
out potential violations of these rules. To run it, enter:

ant badfields

Rules:

1) System.out and System.err should not be used. G.v().out should be
   used instead. It is normally mapped to System.out, but may be
   remapped by a program using Soot as a library or by a GUI.
   If you accidentally send stuff to System.out instead, the output
   will not appear in Eclipse.

2) There should be no calls to System.exit(). This will kill programs
   using Soot as a library and GUIs. Instead, Soot should throw a
   CompilationDeathException or a RuntimeException.

3) Static fields should not be used, unless they are final AND of
   an immutable type such as a primitive type, String, Object,
   Integer or Boolean.

4) Static initializers should not have any side-effects. In particular,
   they should not read any static fields. In addition, in order to
   ensure that static initializers have no side-effects, they should
   not call any methods, except trivial ones known to have no side-effects.

5) Singletons should be implemented as follows:
   - add the name of the singleton to soot/src/singletons.list
   - run soot/src/make_singletons > soot/src/soot/Singletons.java
   - in your singleton, include the following two methods following
     the model in soot.jimple.toolkits.base.Aggregator:

    public Aggregator( Singletons.Global g ) {}
    public static Aggregator v() { return G.v().Aggregator(); }

     The Singletons.Global parameter to the only constructor ensures
     that only the Singletons class may instantiate the singleton,
     since only it can create a Singletons.Global. The v() method
     fetches the singleton instance from the Singletons class.
     THE SINGLETON SHOULD NOT HAVE ITS OWN STATIC FIELD CONTAINING
     THE SINGLETON INSTANCE. soot.G is the only singleton holding
     its own instance, meaning that all global variables and singletons
     can be reset by resetting that one single instance.

6) "ant badfields" should be run periodically to check that these rules
   are being followed. It will report most violations. Unfortunately,
   it also reports some false positives that must be checked by hand.
   Many of these are final static arrays, whose elements are never
   modified. Unfortunately, Java doesn't have a final keyword that
   applies to elements of arrays. It must be checked by hand that these
   elements are never written. Presumably Spark could be used to check
   that elements of static arrays are not written, but this may make
   the checker too clumsy; the intent is for the checker to be widely
   used.

EOF