ROPCO: an environment for micro-incremental reuse

The authors report on the design of ROPCO (reuse of persistent code and object code), a novel approach to reuse utilizing code and object code stored in persistent structures. One of the main motives in the design of ROPCO is to eliminate the compilation of portions of a program which have not been altered, while the consistency of variables and intra program flow graphs remains intact. Basic blocks are selected as units of reuse, and the notion of a `use network´ is devised to accomplish this goal. Another design motive is to store versions of blocks of a program efficiently, while maintaining direct and sequential access to those blocks. Hierarchical and flat persistency methods are utilized to achieve this goal