A disciplinaridade das anotações condicionais de pré-processamento #ifdef TAG Não #endif importa

Abstract

The C preprocessor is a simple, effective, and language-independent tool. Developers use the preprocessor in practice to deal with portability and variability issues. Despite the widespread usage, the C preprocessor suffers from severe criticism, such as negative effects on code understandability and maintainability. In particular, these problems may get worse when using undisciplined annotations, i.e., when a preprocessor directive encompasses only parts of C syntactical units. Nevertheless, despite the criticism and guidelines found in systems like Linux to avoid undisciplined annotations, the results of a previous controlled experiment indicated that the discipline of annotations has no influence on program comprehension and maintenance. To better understand whether developers care about the discipline of preprocessor-based annotations and whether they can really influence on maintenance tasks, in this work we conduct a mixed-method research involving three studies. In the first one we identify undisciplined annotations in 110 open source C/C++ systems of different domains, sizes, and popularity GitHub metrics. We then refactor the identified undisciplined annotations to make them disciplined. Right away, we submit pull requests with our suggestions. The majority of our pull requests have been accepted and are now merged. We reach a total acceptance rate of 71%. In the second study, we mined opensource repositories to find commits where the developer transforms undisciplined codes into disciplined ones. In that context, we found 90 transformations. Those transformations were classified in refactoring or not, and we contacted the responsible to ask why he did that code change. In the third study, we conduct a controlled experiment. We have several differences with respect to the aforementioned one, such as blocking of cofounding effects and more replicas. We have evidences that maintaining undisciplined annotations is more time consuming and error prone, representing a different result when compared to the previous experiment. Overall, we conclude that undisciplined annotations should not be neglected.