Ithaca, NY — GrammaTech, Inc. announced today that it has been awarded a Small Business Innovative Research (SBIR) contract by the Office Of The Secretary Of Defense (OSD) and the United States Navy (USN).
As hardware platforms age, manufacturers are less willing to support them and related technologies. Legacy weapons systems must eventually be modernized, but re-implementation of legacy software by hand is prohibitively expensive. A system is needed for automatically translating software written in obsolete languages like CMS-2 or assembly to a modern language like C. Previous attempts at translation have amounted to transliteration: they produced “high-level” code that closely mimics the low-level code. Some attempts even use global variables for registers. Translators that do more than this often assume that the low-level code was generated by a compiler, and hence adheres to certain conventions; such assumptions do not hold for legacy code. Under this SBIR contract, GrammaTech will investigate promising new methods for modernizing legacy software.
About GrammaTech:
GrammaTech’s static-analysis tools are used worldwide by startups, Fortune 500 companies, educational institutions, and government agencies. The staff includes fourteen researchers with PhDs in programming languages and program analysis.
