Identifying Classes in Legacy JavaScript Code

Abstract

JavaScript is the most popular programming language for the Web. Although the language is prototype-based, developers can emulate class-based abstractions in JavaScript to master the increasing complexity of their applications. Identifying classes in legacy JavaScript code can support these developers at least in the following activities: (i) program comprehension; (ii) migration to the new JavaScript syntax that supports classes; and (iii) implementation of supporting tools, including IDEs with class-based views and reverse engineering tools. In this paper, we propose a strategy to detect class-based abstractions in the source code of legacy JavaScript systems. We report on a large and in-depth study to understand how class emulation is employed, using a dataset of 918 JavaScript applications available on GitHub. We found that almost 70% of the JavaScript systems we study make some usage of classes. We also performed a field study with the main developers of 60 popular JavaScript systems in order to validate our findings. The overall results range from 97% to 100% for precision, from 70% to 89% for recall, and from 82% to 94% for F-score.