Discovering likely mappings between APIs using text mining

Pandita, Rahul; Jetley, Raoul; Sudarsan, Sithu D.; Williams, Laurie

doi:10.1109/scam.2015.7335419

Cited by 25 publications

(12 citation statements)

References 22 publications

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“…Different levels of abstraction delineate automatic approaches. Similarity of text description has been used to map old to new APIs [36], while others [30,32,38] use a syntactic view of programs to build a learned vector-space encoding [28] for migration given an initial parallel mapping. Although the embedding-based approach taken by API2Vec [32] is flexible, the resulting ambiguity is in fact a hindrance when performing migrations.…”

Section: Related Work 81 Library Migrationmentioning

confidence: 99%

M ³

Collie

Ginsbach²,

Woodruff

et al. 2020

Proceedings of the 35th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering

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Library migration is a challenging problem, where most existing approaches rely on prior knowledge. This can be, for example, information derived from changelogs or statistical models of API usage.This paper addresses a different API migration scenario where there is no prior knowledge of the target library. We have no historical changelogs and no access to its internal representation. To tackle this problem, this paper proposes a novel approach (M 3 ), where probabilistic program synthesis is used to semantically model the behavior of library functions. Then, we use an SMT-based code search engine to discover similar code in user applications. These discovered instances provide potential locations for API migrations.We evaluate our approach against 7 well-known libraries from varied application domains, learning correct implementations for 94 functions. Our approach is integrated with standard compiler tooling, and we use this integration to evaluate migration opportunities in 9 existing C/C++ applications with over 1MLoC. We discover over 7,000 instances of these functions, of which more than 2,000 represent migration opportunities. CCS CONCEPTS• Software and its engineering → Software maintenance tools; Software verification and validation; Compilers.

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Section: Related Work 81 Library Migrationmentioning

confidence: 99%

M ³

Collie

Ginsbach²,

Woodruff

et al. 2020

Proceedings of the 35th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering

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“…Similar approaches were tackling the problem of mapping between methods across different languages. The majority of these approaches employed information retrieval and natural language processing techniques to identify similar method usages in different languages [12], [13].…”

Section: Rmentioning

confidence: 99%

On the Use of Information Retrieval to Automate the Detection of Third-Party Java Library Migration at the Method Level

Alrubaye

Mkaouer

Ouni

2019

2019 IEEE/ACM 27th International Conference on Program Comprehension (ICPC)

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The migration process between different thirdparty libraries is hard, complex and error-prone. Typically, during a library migration, developers need to find methods in the new library that are most adequate in replacing the old methods of the retired library. This process is subjective and time-consuming as developers need to fully understand the documentation of both libraries' Application Programming Interfaces, and find the right matching between their methods, if it exists. In this context, several studies rely on mining existing library migrations to provide developers with by-example approaches for similar scenarios. In this paper, we introduce a novel mining approach that extracts existing instances of library method replacements that are manually performed by developers for a given library migration to automatically generate migration patterns in the method level. Thereafter, our approach combines the mined method-change patterns with method-related lexical similarity to accurately detect mappings between replacing/replaced methods. We conduct a large scale empirical study to evaluate our approach on a benchmark of 57,447 open-source Java projects leading to 9 popular library migrations. Our qualitative results indicate that our approach significantly increases the accuracy of mining method-level mappings by an average accuracy of 12%, as well as increasing the number of discovered method mappings, in comparison with existing state-of-the-art studies. Finally, we provide the community with an open source mining tool along with a dataset of all mined migrations at the method level.

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“…In recent years, many studies have shown how the migration rules can be extracted from source code (Kim et al 2007;Xing 2007;Schäfer et al 2008;Wu et al 2010;Nguyen et al 2010;Pandita et al 2015) and the commit history (Dagenais & Robillard 2008; S. Meng et al 2012;Teyton et al 2013;Hora et al 2014;Alrubaye & Mkaouer 2019). These approaches support the developers of client applications and help them update their systems to the latest versions of the external libraries without relying on the library developers to provide a set of migration rules.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Deprewriter: On the fly rewriting method deprecations.

Ducasse¹,

Polito²,

Zaitsev³

et al. 2022

JOT

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Deprecations are a common way to indicate that a given feature or API will not be available in subsequent versions of a library or framework. While raising deprecation warnings lets developers of libraries evolve their APIs, the developers of client applications often have to manually rewrite their applications to adapt to the deprecation (removal, new APIs. . . ). Some may use static analysis tools to support the rewriting. However, dynamically-typed languages or the use of reflective features often produce incorrect rewrite candidates. This is a costly activity that can lead to bug introductions.In this article, we present a method deprecation approach and a tool called DEPREWRITER that can automatically rewrite the callers of deprecated methods during program execution. Clients of a deprecated API execute their program and associated tests, and DEPREWRITER dynamically rewrites the source code of methods that called a deprecated API to use the new API.The implementation of DEPREWRITER is based on dynamic program transformation: when a deprecated method is executed, a program transformation engine rewrites and recompiles the caller's code before continuing the execution.The approach presented in this article has been developed by the Pharo consortium. Since 2016, DEPREWRITER is used in production in multiple distributions of the Pharo programming language: Pharo 6, 7, 8, and 9 alpha. This article presents and validates this approach.The validation is done in two steps: first with an analysis of deprecations available in Pharo 8 and second with an open survey of software developers about DEPREWRITER. We studied 367 Pharo 8 deprecations, among which we analyzed the 218 rewriting deprecations that use transformation rules. We identified the validity conditions and reported defects to the community. We also proposed 33 transformation rules to be added to the non-rewriting deprecations. Both contributions were accepted into Pharo 9 alpha. We classified the rules and identified possible points of improvement. In addition, we performed a user survey and collected information from 46 software developers: some of them used existing DEPREWRITER' rules and executed them on their code, others used DEPREWRITER to create rewriting deprecations, and finally, some were not aware of DEPREWRITER. 28 of 46 developers (60%) reported that the rewriting deprecations helped them, while 10 stated the inverse and 8 were uncertain.After discussing the current implementation, we sketch possible implementations for other languages than Pharo, showing that the approach is general enough to be applied to other languages.

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Discovering likely mappings between APIs using text mining

Cited by 25 publications

References 22 publications

M ³

M ³

On the Use of Information Retrieval to Automate the Detection of Third-Party Java Library Migration at the Method Level

Deprewriter: On the fly rewriting method deprecations.

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