Publications

2024

1. On Polyglot Program Testing

   Philémon Houdaille, Djamel Eddine Khelladi, Benoit Combemale, and Gunter Mussbacher

   In Companion Proceedings of the 32nd ACM International Conference on the Foundations of Software Engineering, New York, NY, USA, 2024

   Abs DOI

   In modern applications, it has become increasingly necessary to use multiple languages in a coordinated way to deal with the complexity and diversity of concerns encountered during development. This practice is known as polyglot programming. However, while execution platforms for polyglot programs are increasingly mature, there is a lack of support in how to test polyglot programs. This paper is a first step to increase awareness about polyglot testing efforts. It provides an overview of how polyglot programs are constructed, and an analysis of the impact on test writing at its different steps. More specifically, we focus on dynamic white box testing, and how polyglot programming impacts selection of input data, scenario specification and execution, and oracle expression. We discuss the related challenges in particular with regards to the current state of the practice. We envision in this paper to raise interest in polyglot program testing within the software engineering community, and help in defining directions for future work.

2023

1. Polyglot AST: Towards Enabling Polyglot Code Analysis

   Philémon Houdaille, Djamel Eddine Khelladi, Romain Briend, Robbert Jongeling, and Benoit Combemale

   In 2023 27th International Conference on Engineering of Complex Computer Systems (ICECCS), 2023

   ISSN: 2770-8535

   Abs DOI

   Today, a plethora of programming languages exists, each better suited for a particular concern. For example, Python is suited for data analysis but not web development, whereas JavaScript is the inverse. As software complexity grows and needs to address multiple concerns, different programming languages are often used in combination, despite the burden of bridging them (e.g., using Java Native Interface). Polyglot programming emerged as a solution allowing the seamless mixing of multiple programming languages. GraalVM and PolyNote are examples of runtimes allowing polyglot programming. However, there is a striking lack of support at design time for building and analyzing polyglot code. To the best of our knowledge, there is no uniform language-agnostic way of reasoning over multiple languages to provide seamless code analysis, since each language comes with its own form of Abstract Syntax Trees (AST). In this paper, we present an approach to build a uniform yet polyglot AST over polyglot code, so that it is easier to perform global analysis. We first motivate this challenge and identify the main requirements for building a polyglot AST. We then propose a proof of concept implementation of our solutions on GraalVM’s polyglot API. On top of the polyglot AST, we demonstrate the ability to implement several polyglot-specific analysis services, namely auto-completion, consistency checking, type inference, and rename refactoring. Our evaluation on three polyglot projects taken from GitHub, and involving JavaScript and Python code, shows that we can build a polyglot AST without significant overhead. We also demonstrate the usefulness of the polyglot analysis services through the provided automation, as well as their scalability.