Generating Valid Interface Definition Language from Succinct Models

Source code generation from models (e.g., domain specific models) for distributed real-time and embedded (DRE) systems is intended to alleviate tedious, error-prone, and time consume tasks associated with manually hand-crafting the same code. When generating code from models for DRE system programming languages that accidentally support circular dependencies, e.g., the Interface Definition Language (IDL) and C++, it is necessary to resolve circular dependencies in order to generate valid and usable code. Moreover, it is important to do some automatically instead of requiring modelers to construct models that do not contain any circular dependencies, which is hard. This paper provides two contributions to research on source code generation from models for DRE systems. First, it presents A-Circle, an algorithm that automatically removes circular dependencies when generating source code from models for programming languages that inherently enable circular dependencies. Secondly, this paper quantitatively evaluates A-Circle when generating CORBA IDL files. The results show that A Circle algorithm is able to generate IDL files in linear-time.