Leviathan: SPL Support on Filesystem Level

Abstract

A lot of configurable software, especially in the domain of embedded and operating systems, is configured with a source preprocessor, mostly to avoid run-time overhead. However, developers then have to face a myriad of preprocessor directives and the corresponding complexity in the source code, even when they might only be working on the implementation of a single feature at a time. Thus, it has long been recognized that tool support is needed to cope with this ‘#ifdef hell’. Current approaches, which assist the software developer by providing preprocessed views, are all bound to a special integrated development environment. This eliminates them from being used both in industry settings (where domain-specific toolchains are often mandated) and in open-source projects (where diverse sets of editors and tools are being used).