“CodeCarbonCopy enables one of the ‘Holy Grails’ of software engineering: automatic code reuse,” said researcher Stelios Sidiroglou-Douskos. “Our view is that, perhaps, we have written most of the software that we’ll ever need; we now just need to reuse it.”
Importantly, says the team, the system can translate between the ‘data representations’ used by donor and recipient programs. Noting that different programs use different internal schemes, the team claims CodeCarbonCopy maps the donor program’s scheme automatically onto that of the recipient, enabling code to be imported seamlessly.