Soot 1.beta.6 released!

[Patrick LAM <plam@sable.mcgill.ca>]

I've put Soot version 1.beta.6 up on the Soot web page, at

http://www.sable.mcgill.ca/soot

This version contains essentially all of the code which will be
in Release 1.  It successfully handles our soot Sentinel suite, a
collection of 262 test programs, including the SpecJVM benchmarks.

Once sufficient documentation is available, we will create Release 1
of Soot.  We hope that this will coincide with the presentation of the
paper "Optimizing Java Bytecode using the Soot Framework: Is it
Feasible?" at CC2000, in Berlin, Germany towards the end of March.
Documentation will be released as it is being written.

I would like to point out again the Soot bug tracking system, at

http://gloom.cs.mcgill.ca/soot

We can only correct bugs which we know about!

Patrick Lam
Sable Research Group
---

From the release notes (index.html):

Improvements in 1.beta.6:

1. A Jimple parser has been added to the Soot framework.  Soot can
now read both .class files and .jimple files (produced by the
"--jimple" option).  Parsing .jimple files is faster than
reading .class files, and these files can be modified easily in a text
editor.

2. Different phases of Sootification can now be passed command-line
options.  For instance, the static inliner (si) in the
whole-jimple optimization pack (wjop) can told that it is to
expand code by no more than a factor of 5, by giving the following
command-line option:  -p wjop.si expansion-factor:5.

3. Some whole-program (excluding library) optimizations are
included, namely a static method binder and a static inliner.  The
inliner is enabled by default when the -W option is given.
It can be disabled with the option  -p wjop.si disabled:true -p
wjop.smb disabled:false.

4. A whole lot of other nifty stuff.  Download Soot and see!

Future work:

The next release of Soot (version 1) is forthcoming.
It will contain the following major additional features:

1. A Soot manual. 

2. Correct name recovery from java classfiles produced with "javac -g".