The Mixed computation laboratory was founded on June 31, 1997. The methods of program semantic analysis, partial and mixed computation, and transformation became the main research area of the laboratory. In the context of this research a number for automatic program specializers were developed both for functional (Scheme) and imperative (Modula-2) programming languages. The focus of the development was on efficiency of the very process of specialization, in the sense of both scalability and the depth of specialization.
These works became the foundation of the long-term cooperation of the laboratory with the American company Relativity Technologies and state enterprise Tercom, formed on the basis of the department of system programming of Sankt-Petersburg State University. A wide spectrum of tools and methodologies for deeper automatic and interactive analysis, comprehension and transformation of heterogeneous production software was developed. All these means were integrated into the system known as Modernization Workbench. Originally the system supported a variety of legacy languages, such as different dialects of COBOL, PL/I, Natural, etc. Recently the set of supported languages was extended to modern languages, such as C++, Java, and Visual Basic.
Primarily the activity of the laboratory in the project was focused on the representation of the results of program analysis to the user, including
- Semantics based navigation over structured source code;
- Graphical representation of program related information;
- Inter-program context sensitive data flow analysis;
- Syntax based search.
Among other tools with considerable scientific background the following ones should be mentioned:
- Automatic data flow based business logic extraction from the source code;
- User-guided splitting of the large system into subsystems based on clusterization algorithms;
- Automatic detection of code duplication.
Besides participation in the Modernization Workbench project the laboratory carried out a number initiative applied research project. For example, the scheduling system for high schools was developed and deployed in several universities, including Novosibirsk State University.