Nobrainer: an Example-Driven Framework for C/C++ Code Transformations

Refactoring is a standard part of any modern development cycle. It helps to reduce technical debt and keep software projects healthy. However, in many cases refactoring requires that transformations are applied globally across multiple files. Applying them manually involves large amounts of monotonous work. Nevertheless, automatic tools are severely underused because users find them unreliable, difficult to adopt, and not customizable enough. This paper presents a new code transformation framework. It delivers an intuitive way to specify the expected outcome of a transformation applied within the whole project. The user provides simple C/C++ code snippets that serve as examples of what the code should look like before and after the transformation. Due to the absence of any additional abstractions (such as domain-specific languages), we believe this approach flattens the learning curve, making adoption easier. Besides using the source code of the provided snippets, the framework also operates at the AST level. This gives it a deeper understanding of the program, which allows it to validate the correctness of the transformation and match the exact cases required by the user.