Your suggestion would be the start of a clean-room or fresh rewrite - so option 3 above, but those are often surprisingly long and unrewarding endeavours, parti

Your suggestion would be the start of a clean-room or fresh rewrite - so option 3 above, but those are often surprisingly long and unrewarding endeavours, particularly in old software like this with lots of users used to its quirks and bugs and who disagree about what the spec should be. Automated translation is obviously not an end goal in itself and doesn't improve code quality, but it could be the start of a successful rewrite as it does at least let them replicate exactly what the old program does, which is very important for end users. A good example of this strategy being used successfully is the use of the tool c2go to convert the Go runtime and compiler from C to go. That involved quite a specific tool tailored to the codebase in question, and a lot of manual cleanup afterwards. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1P3BLR31VA8cvLJLfMibSuTdwTuF7WWLux71CYD0eeD8/edit https://docs.google.com/document/d/1P3BLR31VA8cvLJLfMibSuTdw...