Empirical study of the dynamic behavior of JavaScript objects

Wei, Shiyi; Xhakaj, Françeska; Ryder, Barbara G.

doi:10.1002/spe.2334

Cited by 12 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 38 publications

(105 reference statements)

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“…Mastrangelo et al [2015] studied how Java's sun.misc.Unsafe library is used in libraries and applications. Analogously, Richards et al [2010], Richards et al [2011], and Wei et al [2016] conducted a similar study, but in this case targeting JavaScript's dynamic behavior and in particular the eval function. Also for JavaScript, Madsen and Andreasen [2014] analyzed how fields are accessed via strings, while Jang et al [2010] analyzed privacy violations.…”

Section: Empirical Studies Of Large Code Basesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Casting about in the dark: an empirical study of cast operations in Java programs

Mastrangelo

Hauswirth

Nystrom

2019

Proc. ACM Program. Lang.

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The main goal of a static type system is to prevent certain kinds of errors from happening at run time. A type system is formulated as a set of constraints that gives any expression or term in a program a well-defined type. Yet mainstream programming languages are endowed with type systems that provide the means to circumvent their constraints through casting. We want to understand how and when developers escape the static type system to use dynamic typing. We empirically study how casting is used by developers in more than seven thousand Java projects. We find that casts are widely used (8.7% of methods contain at least one cast) and that 50% of casts we inspected are not guarded locally to ensure against potential run-time errors. To help us better categorize use cases and thus understand how casts are used in practice, we identify 25 cast-usage patternsÐrecurrent programming idioms using casts to solve a specific issue. This knowledge can be: (a) a recommendation for current and future language designers to make informed decisions (b) a reference for tool builders, e.g., by providing more precise or new refactoring analyses, (c) a guide for researchers to test new language features, or to carry out controlled programming experiments, and (d) a guide for developers for better practices. CCS Concepts: • Software and its engineering → General programming languages; Object oriented languages; Software libraries and repositories.

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Section: Empirical Studies Of Large Code Basesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Casting about in the dark: an empirical study of cast operations in Java programs

Mastrangelo

Hauswirth

Nystrom

2019

Proc. ACM Program. Lang.

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“…Richards et al [2010] show that, even though most object properties are initialized while constructing the object, it is also common to add properties to or delete properties from objects afterwards. Wei et al [2016] also investigate the dynamism of objects and show that the average number of own properties per object increases from 28 just after object construction to up to 200 at the end of an object's lifetime. They also report that developers sometimes attempt to delete properties that are not present in the object.…”

Section: Results Of Studiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…-Dynamic code loading, e.g., through eval, is prevalent [Yue and Wang 2009;Richards et al 2010]. -Dynamically adding and removing object properties after an object has been constructed is common [Richards et al 2010;Wei et al 2016]. -Prototype hierarchies often change at runtime [Richards et al 2010;Wei et al 2016].…”

Section: Implications Of Studiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Survey of Dynamic Analysis and Test Generation for JavaScript

et al. 2017

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JavaScript has become one of the most prevalent programming languages. Unfortunately, some of the unique properties that contribute to this popularity also make JavaScript programs prone to errors and difficult for program analyses to reason about. These properties include the highly dynamic nature of the language, a set of unusual language features, a lack of encapsulation mechanisms, and the "no crash" philosophy. This paper surveys dynamic program analysis and test generation techniques for JavaScript targeted at improving the correctness, reliability, performance, security, and privacy of JavaScript-based software.CCS Concepts: r General and reference → Surveys and overviews; r Software and its engineering → Software notations and tools; r Security and privacy → Web application security;

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“…Wei et al, 25 performed an empirical study on JavaScript applications to understand the dynamic behavior of objects. The authors defined and evaluated several dynamic metrics on user and native objects.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

On the (un‐)adoption of JavaScript front‐end frameworks

2021

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JavaScript is characterized by a rich ecosystem of libraries and frameworks.A key element in this ecosystem are frameworks used for implementing the front-end of web-based applications, such as Vue and React. However, despite their relevance, we have few works investigating the factors that drive the adoption-and un-adoption-of front-end-based JavaScript frameworks. Therefore, in this article, we first report the results of a survey with 49 developers where we asked them to describe the factors they consider when selecting a front-end framework. In the second part of the work, we focus on projects that migrate from one framework to another since JavaScript's ecosystem is also very dynamic. Finally, we provide a quantitative characterization of the migration effort and reveal the main barriers faced by the developers during this effort. Although not completely generalizable, our central findings are as follows: (a) popularity and learnability are the key factors that motivate the choice of front-end frameworks in JavaScript; (b) from the 49 surveyed developers, one out of four have plans to migrate to another framework in the future; (c) the time spent performing the migration is greater than or equal to the time spent using the old framework in all studied projects. We conclude with a list of implications for practitioners, framework developers, tool builders, and researchers.

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Empirical study of the dynamic behavior of JavaScript objects

Cited by 12 publications

References 38 publications

Casting about in the dark: an empirical study of cast operations in Java programs

Casting about in the dark: an empirical study of cast operations in Java programs

A Survey of Dynamic Analysis and Test Generation for JavaScript

On the (un‐)adoption of JavaScript front‐end frameworks

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