Lightweight Multilingual Software Analysis

Damian Lyons, Anne Bogar, David Baird

2017

Abstract

Developer preferences, language capabilities and the persistence of older languages contribute to the trend that large software codebases are often multilingual – that is, written in more than one computer language. While developers can leverage monolingual software development tools to build software components, companies are faced with the problem of managing the resultant large, multilingual codebases to address issues with security, efficiency, and quality metrics. The key challenge is to address the opaque nature of the language interoperability interface: one language calling procedures in a second (which may call a third, or even back to the first), resulting in a potentially tangled, inefficient and insecure codebase. An architecture is proposed for lightweight static analysis of large multilingual codebases – the MLSA architecture. Its modular and table-oriented structure addresses the open-ended nature of multiple languages and language interoperability APIs. We focus here as an application on the construction of call-graphs that capture both interlanguage and intra-language calls. The algorithms for extracting multilingual call-graphs from codebases are presented, and several examples of multilingual software engineering analysis are discussed. The state of the implementation and testing of MLSA is presented, and the implications for future work are discussed.

Paper Citation

in Bibtex Style

@conference{eps madrid 201717,
author={Damian Lyons and Anne Bogar and David Baird},
title={Lightweight Multilingual Software Analysis},
booktitle={Challenges and Opportunities in ICT Research Projects - Volume 1: EPS Madrid 2017,},
year={2017},
pages={35-51},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0007904900350051},
isbn={978-989-758-309-4},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF

JO - Challenges and Opportunities in ICT Research Projects - Volume 1: EPS Madrid 2017,
TI - Lightweight Multilingual Software Analysis
SN - 978-989-758-309-4
AU - Lyons D.
AU - Bogar A.
AU - Baird D.
PY - 2017
SP - 35
EP - 51
DO - 10.5220/0007904900350051

in Harvard Style

Lyons D., Bogar A. and Baird D. (2017). Lightweight Multilingual Software Analysis.In Challenges and Opportunities in ICT Research Projects - Volume 1: EPS Madrid 2017, ISBN 978-989-758-309-4, pages 35-51. DOI: 10.5220/0007904900350051