[Soot-list] Google Summer of Code

[Eric Bodden]

Hi all.

At last year's SOAP workshop we discussed the possibility of pushing
the development of Soot through applications to the Google Summer of
Code project. The application deadline is usually in early March, so
we should probably be discussing possible topics and who would be
mentoring them.

I personally have interest in the following topics:

1.) Efficient storage and retrieval of summary information.
This concerns (a) storage and retrieval of Jimple bodies, which is
still quite a bottleneck and could benefit from (de)serialization, and
(b) storage and retrieval of general analysis (summary) information.
The hope is that this would make (re)analysis of applications more
efficient.
It may, for instance, be interesting to try our Darko Marinov's
deserialization scheme from ISSTA 2011:
http://mir.cs.illinois.edu/~marinov/publications/GligoricETAL11CoDeSe.pdf

2.) Debugging support for Heros:
It would be great to have visual debugging support in Eclipse for
static analyses defined with Heros. Actually I have already written
this up as a thesis-topic proposal but I am currently lacking students
who would be interested in taking on the job...
http://www.ec-spride.tu-darmstadt.de/csf/sse/teaching_sse/theses_sse/abschlussarbeitdetails_2176.en.jsp

3.) Generation of StackMapTable attributes. This is becoming important
because Java 8 requires them but Soot does not support their
generation yet. A simple solution would be to use ASM to add the
attributes to the bytecode that Soot generated (in a separate step).
However, this would enlarge Soot's tool chain yet again. It may be
better to just generate the attributes within Soot directly instead.


It would be great if especially those of you who have experience with
GSOC could comment on whether they feel such topics would be
appropriate, what should have priority and whether you know of any
other topics that would useful.

Cheers,
Eric
-- 
Eric Bodden, Ph.D., http://sse.ec-spride.de/ http://bodden.de/
Head of Secure Software Engineering Group at EC SPRIDE
Tel: +49 6151 16-75422    Fax: +49 6151 16-72051
Room 3.2.14, Mornewegstr. 30, 64293 Darmstadt