On the Impact of Inter-language Dependencies in Multi-language Systems

Abstract

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