Consolidating SootUp to become a leading Static-Analysis Framework (CoSA)

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Eric Bodden
• Subject Area: Software Engineering and Programming Languages
• Term: since 2026
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 576669774

Soot is probably the worldwide most popular framework for analyzing and transforming Java and Android applications. During its lifetime of more than 20 years, researchers have developed countless research tools directly based on Soot. The Soot framework offers these tools a common implementation platform. This common platform increases comparability between the tools and greatly reduced the time and cost of their implementation. In a previous DFG-project within the special funding scheme of Research Software Sustainability, we have developed SootUp, a successor of Soot with a modernized architecture, which allows SootUp to be easier to use, test, maintain and extend than Soot. Nonetheless, SootUp is not yet established; due to a range of features that long-term users of Soot have gotten to appreciate in Soot and which SootUp still lacks, many such users are still blocked from migrating to SootUp. The goal of this project is thus to expand SootUp with these important features, to allow the community to adopt it as the new de-facto standard for performing program analysis for Java and Android. Once realized, the community will then be able to consolidate its efforts by declaring Soot ‘end of life’ and shift its maintenance resources to SootUp and hence sustainably ensuring its continued accessibility and maintenance.

• DFG Programme: Research data and software (Scientific Library Services and Information Systems)
• Participating Institution: Fraunhofer-Institut für Entwurfstechnik Mechatronik (IEM)
• Co-Investigator: Dr.-Ing. Steven Arzt