Franca IDL C Code Generator Development and Evaluation of New Tools for Franca IDL

Abstract

Franca IDL is an interface description language, commonly used in the automotive infotainment industry to define the interfaces of software components in a language-independent way. Code generators for the language are available, which convert Franca IDL interface files to server stub and proxy code in an implementation language, using the Remote Procedure Call paradigm and the D-Bus Inter-Process Communication system to enable communication between them. The present code generators available for Franca IDL have several problems which affect the productivity of companies using them. These problems consist of heavyweight software dependencies, both in regard to the code generators and to the implementation code generated by them. The code generators also give very low-quality build feedback when used in automated build systems, making it difficult to find errors in the code. In this thesis, FrancaCCG, a set of open source prototype code generators developed as part of this thesis work, is presented and evaluated. The prototypes successfully solve the identified problems of the old code generators, due to giving build feedback of better quality and having a minimum of external software dependencies. The code generated by FrancaCCG is runtime compatible with the code generated by the old code generators. FrancaCCG currently supports a subset of the Franca IDL and can be further developed to include more features of Franca IDL, further increasing its usefulness.