Mining billions of AST nodes to study actual and potential usage of Java language features

Dyer, Robert; Rajan, Hridesh; Nguyen, Hoan Anh; Nguyen, Tien N.

doi:10.1145/2568225.2568295

Cited by 86 publications

(65 citation statements)

References 32 publications

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“…Parnin et al have studied adoption of Java generics [70], Pinto et al studied concurrent programming constructs [71], and Dyer et al studied features prior to their official release [72]. Similar studies have also been conducted, e.g., for C# [73] and PHP [60].…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Challenges for Static Analysis of Java Reflection - Literature Review and Empirical Study

Landman

Serebrenik

Vinju

2017

2017 IEEE/ACM 39th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE)

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Abstract-The behavior of software that uses the Java Reflection API is fundamentally hard to predict by analyzing code. Only recent static analysis approaches can resolve reflection under unsound yet pragmatic assumptions. We survey what approaches exist and what their limitations are. We then analyze how realworld Java code uses the Reflection API, and how many Java projects contain code challenging state-of-the-art static analysis.Using a systematic literature review we collected and categorized all known methods of statically approximating reflective Java code. Next to this we constructed a representative corpus of Java systems and collected descriptive statistics of the usage of the Reflection API. We then applied an analysis on the abstract syntax trees of all source code to count code idioms which go beyond the limitation boundaries of static analysis approaches. The resulting data answers the research questions. The corpus, the tool and the results are openly available.We conclude that the need for unsound assumptions to resolve reflection is widely supported. In our corpus, reflection can not be ignored for 78 % of the projects. Common challenges for analysis tools such as non-exceptional exceptions, programmatic filtering meta objects, semantics of collections, and dynamic proxies, widely occur in the corpus. For Java software engineers prioritizing on robustness, we list tactics to obtain more easy to analyze reflection code, and for static analysis tool builders we provide a list of opportunities to have significant impact on real Java code.Keywords-Java; Reflection; Static Analysis; Systematic Literature Review; Empirical Study I. I Static analysis techniques are applied to support the efficiency and quality of software engineering tasks. Be it for understanding, validating, or refactoring source code, pragmatic static analysis tools exist to reduce error-prone manual labor and to increase the comprehension of complex software artefacts.Static analysis of object-oriented code is an exciting, ongoing and challenging research area, made especially challenging by dynamic language features (a.k.a. reflection). The Java Reflection API allows programmers to dynamically inspect and interact with otherwise static language concepts such as classes, fields and methods, e.g., to dynamically instantiate objects, set fields and invoke methods. These dynamic language features are useful, but their usage also wreaks havoc on the accuracy of static analysis results. This is due to the undecidability of resolving dynamic names and dynamic types.Until 2005, the analysis of code which uses the Reflection API was considered to be out of bounds for static analysis, and handled via user annotations or dynamic analysis; handling reflection would inherently be either unsound (due to unverified assumptions) or highly inaccurate (due to over-approximation) and render the contemporary static analysis tools impractical. Then, in 2005 Livshits et al. [1] published an analysis of how reflection was used in six large Java projects...

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Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Challenges for Static Analysis of Java Reflection - Literature Review and Empirical Study

Landman

Serebrenik

Vinju

2017

2017 IEEE/ACM 39th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE)

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“…Dyer et al, in their large scale investigation of Java projects hosted on SourceForge 12 , found that new features are used by developers before the official release of the specification, taking advantage of the beta/pre-releases [41]. More likely than not, also the developers who worked on the projects included in the baseline corpus, adopted new language features during the development process.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Moreover, Dyer et al found also that the majority of newly introduced language features are rarely used by developers [41], with few meaningful exception. According to Qiu et al [42], who conducted a large-scale study on the use of Java constructs, the distribution of syntactic rules usage is Zipfian, with 20% of the most-used rules accounting for 85% of all rule usage, whereas the 65% of the leastused rules is used less than 5%.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Pluggable Controllers and Nano-Patterns in Java with Lola

Gil¹,

Marcovitch²,

Orrù³

et al. 2017

Adv. sci. technol. eng. syst. j.

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“…They extracted this information from an XML representation (i.e., srcML) of the source code of subject systems. Dyer et al [23] conducted a very largescale study on 31K open-source Java projects to find usages of new Java language features over time. This is done on the Abstract Syntax Tree (i.e., AST) of the source code of the subject systems.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%