PolyFax: a toolkit for characterizing multi-language software

Abstract

Today’s software systems are mostly developed in multiple languages (i.e., multi-language software), yet tool support for understanding and assuring these systems is rare. To facilitate future research on multi-language software engineering, this paper presents PolyFax, a toolkit that offers automated means for dataset collection from GitHub and two analysis utilities--a vulnerability-fixing commit categorization tool (VCC) and a language interfacing mechanism identification/categorization tool (LIC). The VCC tool immediately assists with assessing the vulnerability proneness of a given multi-language project based on its version histories, while the LIC tool enables dissection of the most important aspect of the construction of multi-language systems. Application of PolyFax to 7,113 multi-language projects with 12.6 million commits showed its practical usefulness in terms of promising efficiency and accuracy for studying multi-language software.

BibTeX

@inproceedings{Li-al:FSE22,
  author    = {Wen Li and
               Li Li and
               Haipeng Cai},
  title     = {{PolyFax:} a toolkit for characterizing multi-language software},
  booktitle = {{ESEC/SIGSOFT} {FSE}},
  pages     = {1662--1666},
  publisher = {{ACM}},
  year      = {2022},
}

PolyFax: a toolkit for characterizing multi-language software

Abstract

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