Principles for writing reusable libraries

ABSTRACT

Over the past 10 years, the Software Engineering Research Department in AT&T has been engaging in a research program to build a collection of highly portable advanced software tools known as Ast, Advanced Software Technology. A recent monograph, “Practical Reusable UNIX Software” (John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1995), summarizes the philosophy and components of this research program. A major component of this program is a collection of portable, and reusable libraries servicing a wide range of functions, from a porting base to all known UNIX platforms, to efficient buffered I/O, memory allocation, data compression, and expression evaluation. The libraries currently stand at about 150,000 non-commented lines of C code. They are developed and maintained independently by different researchers. Yet they work together seamlessly—largely because of a collection of library design principles and conventions developed to help maintaining interface consistency and reducing needless or overlapped work.

REFERENCES

• 1: AT&T, UNIX System V Release 4 Programmer's Guide: ANSI C and Programming Support Tools, Prentice Hall PTR, Upper Saddle River, NJ, 1990
• 2: Balachander Krishnamurthy, Practical reusable UNIX software, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., New York, NY, 1995
• 3: Morris, I. Bolsky , David G. Korn, The KornShell command and programming language, Prentice-Hall, Inc., Upper Saddle River, NJ, 1989
• 4: Yih-Farn Chen. The C Program Database and Its Applications. In Proceedings of the Summer 1989 USENIX Conference, pages 157-171, June 1989.
• 5: Computer Science Divisions University of California, Berkeley. UNIX Programmer's ManuM, 4.3 Berkeley Software Distribution, April 1986.
• 6: Glenn S. Fowler. The Fourth Generation Make. In Proceedings of the USENIX 1985 Summer Conference, pages 159-174, June 1985.
• 7: Glenn S. Fowler. cql- A Flat File Database Query Language. In Proceedings of the USENIX Winter 1994 Conference, pages 11-21, January 1994.
• 8: Glenn S. Fowler, David G. Korn, J. J. Snyder, and Kiem-Phong Vo. Feature-Based Portability. in VHLL Usenix Symposium on Very High Level Languages, October 1994.
• 9: Glenn $. Fowler, David G. Korn, and Kiem-Phong Vo. An Efficient File Hierarchy Walker. In USENIX Summer 1989 Conference Proceedings, pages 173- 188, Baltimore, MD USA, 1989. USENIX Association , Berkeley, CA , USA.
• 10: David G. Korn and Kiem-Phong Vo. SFIO: Safe/Fast String/File IO. In Proceedings of Summer USENIX Conference, pages 235-256. USENIX, 1991.
• 11: Stephen C. North and Kiem-Phong Vo. Dictionary and Graph Libraries. In Proceeding of Winter USENIX Conference, pages 1-11. USENIX, 1993.
• 12: Posix- part 1: System application program interface, 1990.
• 13: David S. Rosenblum, Towards a method of programming with assertions, Proceedings of the 14th international conference on Software engineering, p.92-104, May 11-15, 1992, Melbourne, Australia [doi>10.1145/143062.143098]
• 14: Kiem-Phong Vo. Vmalloc: A general and efficient memory allocator. 1994. Available from the author.
• 15: Kiem-Phong Vo. Writing reusable libraries with discipline and method. 1994. Available from the author.

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  D. Software
  D.2 SOFTWARE ENGINEERING
      D.2.m Miscellaneous
          Subjects: Reusable software**

Additional Classification:
  D. Software
  D.2 SOFTWARE ENGINEERING
      D.2.2 Design Tools and Techniques
          Subjects: Software libraries

General Terms:
Theory