Section: New Results

Empirical analyses of source code

Rascal was used to perform empirical investigations of existing source code bases. First of all, Davy Landman performed an analysis of project management source code to investigate if domain knowledge is present in source code and, if so, how easy it is to extract that knowledge [26] . An earlier experiment in static analysis of PHP code was finalized by Mark Hills. The result is a deep study of feature usage in a large number of well-known PHP projects [25] . Vadim Zaytsev conducted an experiment to recognize micro-patterns in grammars and meta-models [32] . Finally, Jeroen van den Bos performed a deep empirical study to find out as to how far a domain-specific language facilitates evolution [34] . The results showed that the Derric DSL did indeed cover most evolution scenarios, but there is still room for improving the language. In all cases Rascal proved to be instrumental in performing the experiments.