C++ codebase rewrite from MFC to *nix

Question

I'm interning in a company for the summer and I've to look at different ways of looking at the current codebase (C++,MFC, around 100K lines) and using state machines to model the current program.

I've been reading a couple papers and CPP2XMi looks like it may be some use to try to build sequence diagrams as a start.

The end goal is to gauge the feasibility of moving away from microsoft as an O/S and look at development (possibly in another language) on *nix.

I've also started looking at the MFC dependancies to see if we could just port the current C++ code.

I've had the program running through WINE and performance-wise, it seems acceptable but I still need to investigate other solutions as this will only work on X86 while we have other solutions running running on MIPS and ARM.

Any other ideas or caveats I could look at?

Answer 1

The first thing I would look at is where do I use mfc and other non portable stuff. If the only place there is mfc is in the interface layer for example you then can isolate the work.

If there is no such separation I would look at the fesablity of creating some sections of the code that are isolated and portable. Once you have a base of portability you can begin abstracting all of the services rendered by the non portable code. Any way you slice it though MFC to Nix is a big change and will require a significant amount of work. One other possibility is to see if you can run it under a windows emulator.