Many tasks in an integrated programming environment require access to program information for their implementation. Program Database Toolkit (PDT) is a framework for analyzing source code written in several programming languages and for making rich program knowledge accessible to developers of static and dynamic analysis tools. PDT implements a standard program representation, the program database (PDB), that can be accessed in a uniform way through a class library supporting common PDB operations. Software tools can use this library to accomplish tasks such as
- documentation of program components
- creation of graphic program browsers that show class hierarchies, function call graphs, and template instantiations
- insertion of instrumentation for performance profiling and tracing; andgeneration of interface details for calling library routines or buildinginterlanguage bindings.
This architecture diagram shows the PDT framework and the tools that have been developed to use it. These are discussed more fully below. characteristics, direct parent classes, member function IDs, and information on other members. The template and macro sections report source information, type, and text of each entity. As the needs of the tools increase, so will the sophistication of the IL conversion and the PDB.