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Next: FINAL THOUGHTS Up: SUCCESSFUL AUTOMATIC CODE GENERATION Previous: A Recipe for Success

Commercial Tools

There are several commercial systems that generate code. But business reasons dictate that these systems are rather general purpose. Developing systems that generate custom code for a narrow domain is not commercially viable unless we can greatly simplify the construction and configuration of such system.

Integrated Systems offers MatrixX, a system for graphically specifying control systems and for generating code from such specifications. The product is much more mature and feature-rich than FCG but suffers from the lack of customization. The generated code cannot easily be integrated into the satellite architecture. MatrixX was actively considered but was perceived as much higher risk and more disruptive than FCG.

National Instruments' LabVIEW and BridgeVIEW are products for graphically designing data acquisition and signal processing applications.

Other examples of successful automatic code generators include parser generators and attribute grammar systems as well as numerous generators for graphic user interfaces.



Wolfgang Polak
1999-06-02