Experiences in using cetus for source-to-source transformations

Cetus is a compiler infrastructure for the source-to-source transformation of programs. Since its creation nearly three years ago, it has grown to over 12,000 lines of Java code, been made available publically on the web, and become a basis for several research projects. We discuss our experience using Cetus for a selection of these research projects. The focus of this paper is not the projects themselves, but rather how Cetus made these projects possible, how the needs of these projects influenced the development of Cetus, and the solutions we applied to problems we encountered with the infrastructure. We believe the research community can benefit from such a discussion, as shown by the strong interest in the mini-workshop on compiler research infrastructures where some of this information was first presented.