On the Impact of Interlanguage Dependencies in Multilanguage Systems Empirical Case Study on Java Native Interface Applications (JNI)

Abstract

Nowadays, developers are often using multiple programming languages to exploit the advantages of each language and to reuse code. However, dependency analysis across multilanguage is more challenging compared to mono-language systems. In this article, we introduce two approaches for multilanguage dependency analysis: static multilanguage dependency analyzer) and historical multilanguage dependency analyzer, which we apply on ten open-source multilanguage systems to empirically analyze the prevalence of the dependencies across languages, i.e., interlanguage dependencies and their impact on software quality and security. Our main results show that: the more interlanguage dependencies, the higher the risk of bugs and vulnerabilities being introduced, while this risk remains constant for intralanguage dependencies; the percentage of bugs within interlanguage dependencies is three times higher than the percentage of bugs identified in intralanguage dependencies; the percentage of vulnerabilities within interlanguage dependencies is twice the percentage of vulnerabilities introduced in intralanguage dependencies.