I have large codebase written in HSP(wikipedia article – think “BASIC”, but japanese).
By “large” I mean it has 151352 lines of code, 60 source files with total code size of 4.5 megabytes. Also, it has plenty of spaghetti code, no comments and badly needs refactoring. The good thing is that it has a lot of text messages, so not all of those lines represent actual program logic.
I’d like to convert this codebase to C++, while retaining my sanity. “I’d like” means that I’m not required to do it, but I’d strongly prefer to find a method to do it.
What’s a good way to do it? Obviously, I can’t just rewrite it all in C++ (Well, I could do it in theory, but it would take up to 2 years, and I would introduce many bugs in process), so (I think) a reasonable decision would be to implement code recompiler/preprocessor that would allow me to convert source code into messy C++ (HSP is much simpler than C++, so it should be possible) and then start refactoring/documenting the result.
Unfortunately, i’m not entirely sure how to approach building the recompiler efficiently. While I know there are Lex/Yacc/Bison/Boost::spirit, I haven’t used them personally.
So can you recommend a good way perform such conversion?
Any free tool (“free” as in “free beer”) that is available on windows platform is allowed, as long as it doesn’t affect license of original source code.
According to original owner of the codebase, HSP starting with version 3 includes HSP to C code converter. Information is not verified due to lack of time, but this blog article documents the tool called hspcnv which is supposed to convert HSP code into C code. The article is in japanese.