[Soot-list] Getting started with soot

[Patrick LAM]

Hi Tom,

Say hi to Chandra for me.

On Mon, 8 Nov 2004 thjacobs at umich.edu wrote:

> 1. Can you offer advice as to what I'm doing wrong in my use of soot, or how I
> can run a simple test to get the hang of using it?

>From your description, it sounds like you're not giving the Soot Eclipse
plugin any files to analyze.  Have you tried the directions in

http://www.sable.mcgill.ca/soot/eclipse/soot-eclipse-plugin-howto.html

In particular, you need to have a java file and then running Soot will
dump stuff in the sootOutput format.

> 2. I don't know if any of you out there are familiar with the Apache Jakarta
> BCEL project, but if you are, I wonder if you could compare their system with
> yours and/or offer me any advice as to which is more applicable to what I want
> to do. My initial reaction to both systems is that soot is preferable, and has
> better support; that's why I'm sending this email.

I've never really used BCEL, but from talking to people who have used it,
it appears to be a low-level tool which is useful for doing quick analyses
and transformations of bytecode.  I think that Soot is slower than BCEL,
but if you want to do anything semantic, like type-checking, Soot is
probably your better bet.  It makes a lot more information available to
the developer and goes to some length to make sure that its intermediate
representation is easy to analyze.  For instance, if you're using BCEL,
you'll have to deal with stack-based Java bytecode; Soot uses the
stackless three-address code Jimple intermediate representation.

pat