[Soot-list] Soot needs better documentation

[Eric Bodden]

Dear Prashant,

thanks a lot for your feedback.

I guess that generally many people would agree with you. On the other
hand, I have looked at many other program analysis frameworks, and
compared to others (e.g. Wala) Soot actually compares quite favorably.
Comparing Soot to ASM is not really fair, as it's comparing a butter
knife to a swiss-army knife.

Have you had a look at our tutorials page? Do you not find those useful?
http://www.sable.mcgill.ca/soot/tutorial/index.html

ASM, to the best of my knowledge, is actually being maintained in a
commercial setting, i.e., people are spending money on its
documentation because they make money with products based on ASM. Soot
is maintained in an academic setting, which currently means that
people like me are doing a lot of unpaid work on a voluntary basis to
contribute to Soot and its documentation as much as possible outside
their regular work time.

> We ourselves tried to use and even contribute to Soot, but the lack of
> proper documentation made things so tough that we rather wrote the
> algorithms by hand which probably are already implemented in Soot.

Well, you did not really ask on this mailing list, did you? Usually we
try to answer questions within a day or so, which should often help
people to find what they are looking for.

> There is no point in having a great library if you don't have great
> documentation to accompany it.
>
> I would rather take a less functional, fully documented library which I can
> at least use.

Well, nobody is forcing you or anybody else to use Soot. The fact is
that for anything that goes beyond simple instrumentation task it is
to the best of my knowledge, apart from Wala, the only tool in
existence. And, as said above, the documentation (and API!) for Wala
is much worse.

Cheers,
Eric