Название: Rearchitecting Software: Source Code Comprehension and Refactoring Applied to Flight Software and Simulation
Автор: Ignacio Chechile
Издательство: Independently published
Год: 2023
Страниц: 202
Язык: английский
Формат: pdf (true)
Размер: 44.7 MB

The main idea is to delve into some codebase by breaking them down and see what they are made of. We will get compiler errors galore in the process. Granted, compiler errors can be annoying, but you must embrace them, for they provide a lot of information any source code analyst must ingest and use in their own advantage. In a way, we will put the code in an interrogation room, and we will make it sing like a bird.

The ambitious objective of our work is to learn about two programs’ architectures and design styles in a way we will be able to alter them, refactor them, recompile them a hundred times if necessary, and eventually hook them together. For what exactly? We will try a to write a basic autopilot of a Boeing 737. From ignorance to firing an airliner. Ambitious, huh? How are we going to achieve that? Well, let’s find out.

For practicing code comprehension, we will use a flight simulation engine combined with a flight software framework, both running on Linux. The projects that we will use are:

- JSBSIM Flight Simulation Engine
- Core Flight System (cFS) running on Linux.

The main idea is to delve into their codebase by breaking them down and see what they are made of. We will get compiler errors galore in the process. Granted, compiler errors can be annoying, but you must embrace them, for they provide a lot of information any source code analyst must ingest and use in their own advantage. In a way, we will put the code in an interrogation room, and we will make it sing like a bird.

The steps ahead are rather straightforward. First and foremost, we will get the code, we will set up a proper code analysis environment, and we will start tampering it. We will fiddle with source code to make two projects that grew totally unaware of each other to interact; we will craft our tiny Frankenstein. These projects, combined together, have around 160K lines of code between C and C++ which, although not the biggest code base ever, it is still complex enough to make us think.