Mainstream Programming Languages Research Articles

MoTion: A new declarative object matching approach in Pharo

Pattern matching is an expressive way of matching data and extracting pieces of information from it. The recent inclusion of pattern matching in the Java and Python languages highlights that such a facility is more and more adopted by developers for everyday development. Other main stream programming languages also offer pattern matching capabilities as part of the language (Rust, Scala, Haskell, and OCaml), with different degrees of expressivity in what can be matched. In the meantime, in graphs, pattern matching takes a slightly different turn; it enhances the expressivity of the patterns that can be defined. Smalltalk currently offers little pattern matching capability to find specific objects inside a large graph of objects using a declarative pattern. In Pharo, the closest library to classical pattern matching that exists is the RBParseTreeSearcher, which allows to express specialized patterns over a Pharo Abstract Syntax Tree to find some inner node. The question arises of what features a flexible pattern matching language should have. In this paper, we review the features found in different existing pattern matching languages, both in General Purpose Languages (like Java) and in declarative graph pattern matching languages. We then describe MoTion, a new pattern matching engine for Pharo smalltalk, combining all these features. We discuss some aspects of MoTion’s implementation and illustrate its use with real case examples.

Degrees of Separation: A Flexible Type System for Safe Concurrency

Data races have long been a notorious problem in concurrent programming. They are hard to detect, and lead to non-deterministic behaviours. There has been a lot of interest in type systems that statically guarantee data race freedom. Significant progress has been made in this area, and these type systems are increasingly usable and practical. However, their adoption in mainstream programming languages is still limited, which is largely attributed to their strict alias prevention principles that obstruct the usage of existing programming patterns. This is a deterrent to the migration of existing code bases. To tackle this problem, we propose Capture Separation Calculus (System CSC), a calculus that models fork-join parallelism and statically prevents data races while being compatible with established programming patterns. It follows a control-as-you-need philosophy: by default, aliases are allowed, but they are tracked in the type system. When data races are a concern, the tracked aliases are controlled to prevent data-race-prone patterns. We study the formal properties of System CSC. Type soundness is proven via the standard progress and preservation theorems. Additionally, we formally verify the data race freedom property of System CSC by proving that the reduction of a well-typed program is confluent.

Translating meaning representations to behavioural interface specifications

Higher-order logic can be used for meaning representation in natural language processing to encode the semantic relationships in text. Alternatively, using a formal specification language for meaning representation is more precise for specifying programs and widely supported by automatic theorem provers, while deductive verification based on higher order logic is less common for mainstream programming languages. This paper addresses the research question of translating higher-order logic meaning representations generated from method-level code comments into a formal specification language that extends first-order logic. Doing so requires resolving possible ambiguities in determining the appropriate semantics for predicates. This is an open challenge in the path toward using natural language processing with formal methods. To address this, the paper proposes an approach and constructs a compiler for translating meaning representations, generated from Java programs with method-level comments, into Java Modelling Language. We evaluate the compiler on a set of representative benchmarks, including programs and specifications from the Java API, by generating Java Modelling Language specifications and statically checking them with a theorem prover. Results show that in 94% of the cases Java Modelling Language is accurately generated and in 97% of those cases it can be automatically checked with a state-of-the-art theorem prover.

Improving domain-specific neural code generation with few-shot meta-learning

Context:Neural code generation aims to automatically generate code snippets guided by Natural Language Descriptions (NLDs). In recent years, various neural code generation models for mainstream Programming Languages (PLs), such as Java and Python, have been proposed and demonostrated significant success in prior studies. Nonetheless, due to the scarcity of available training examples for some domain-specific PLs, such as Solidity, Bash, and Clojure, simply adopting previous neural models may lead to overfitting and inadequate learning. Objective:To overcome this challenge, we propose MetaCoder, a novel meta-learning code generation approach that efficiently extracts general-purpose knowledge from a large-scale source language and rapidly adapts to domain-specific scenarios, even with relatively few samples. Method:MetaCoder employs MAML, a powerful few-shot meta-learning method, to construct a transfer learning framework. This framework learns general-purpose knowledge from large-scale source languages and applies it in domain-specific target languages. To acquire more general-purpose knowledge, heterogeneous sub-tasks are constructed from the source language during the pre-training phase of MAML. As such, combining with CodeBERT and K-means, we design an unsupervised category assignment method for code generation samples, thereby exploiting the n-way k-shot rule to construct the heterogeneous sub-tasks. Consequently, MetaCoder can be applied to the code generation field. Results:We evaluate MetaCoder with both tree-based (e.g., TreeGen) and sequence-based (e.g., CodeGPT) backbones on two domain-specific PLs, including Solidity and Bash. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superior performance of our approach compared to baselines and verified its capability of code generation visually in practice. Conclusion:MetaCoder effectively extracts general-purpose knowledge from large-scale source languages, thereby enhancing model performance. Therefore, we highly recommend MetaCoder as a code generation approach for domain-specific PLs.

High-performance Deterministic Concurrency Using Lingua Franca

Actor frameworks and similar reactive programming techniques are widely used for building concurrent systems. They promise to be efficient and scale well to a large number of cores or nodes in a distributed system. However, they also expose programmers to nondeterminism, which often makes implementations hard to understand, debug, and test. The recently proposed reactor model is a promising alternative that enables deterministic concurrency. In this article, we present an efficient, parallel implementation of reactors and demonstrate that the determinacy of reactors does not imply a loss in performance. To show this, we evaluate Lingua Franca (LF), a reactor-oriented coordination language. LF equips mainstream programming languages with a deterministic concurrency model that automatically takes advantage of opportunities to exploit parallelism. Our implementation of the Savina benchmark suite demonstrates that, in terms of execution time, the runtime performance of LF programs even exceeds popular and highly optimized actor frameworks. We compare against Akka and CAF, which LF outperforms by 1.86× and 1.42×, respectively.

Effective handling of exceptional situations in robust software agents

Software agents are normally expected to operate in open and dynamic environments, and therefore they are often supposed to face situations that significantly deviate from the nominal course of events. The effective management of exceptional situations is of paramount importance to provide agents with the needed means to operate in their environments, mostly because these situations should be considered as the norm in open and dynamic environments. This paper presents some recent additions to the Jadescript agent-oriented programming language that were specifically designed to provide agents with the needed capabilities to effectively detect and manage exceptional situations. The first part of this paper motivates the need of sophisticated exception handling capabilities, also by relating the proposed language features with the state of the art documented in the literature. Then, the second part of this paper discusses the proposed language features, also considering the conceptual similarities and differences with the related features normally available in mainstream programming languages. In particular, the proposed language features are presented in terms of three language improvements: the general-purpose support to handle exceptions, the specific support to handle behaviour failures, and the specific support to handle stale messages. Finally, before concluding with some indications on future research activities, the third part of this paper describes a concrete example intended to practically present the actual use of the new language features.

AIADA: Accuracy Impact Assessment of Deprecated Python API Usages on Deep Learning Models

TensorFlow is an end-to-end open-source machine learning platform including various tools, libraries, and community resources. It supports users to use many mainstream programming languages including Python. TensorFlow contains multiple abstraction layers, with APIs play significant roles in every layers. In the version iteration of TensorFlow platform development, with the release of new TensorFlow versions, because of functionality evolution, or security and performance-related changes, some APIs eventually become unnecessary. These issues cause APIs to deprecate and influence the accuracy of deep learning models results. Prior studies have investigated API evolution and its potential impact on projects. However, their studies mainly focus on API evolution instead of API deprecation, and they do not find out how the evolution affects results of deep learning models in TensorFlow. Therefore, we present a research-based prototype tool called AIADA and apply it to different revisions of the TensorFlow platform projects code for characterizing deprecated APIs. Based on the data mined by AIADA, we develop a quantitative assessment of deprecated Python APIs usages on deep learning models accuracy. We first count the amount of TensorFlow Python APIs that are deprecated, finding out that with the development of TensorFlow version, the number of deprecated APIs increases constantly. Second, we discuss the reason behind TensorFlow Python APIs become deprecated, discover that name change, weed out, and compatibility issue lead to the main cause of deprecation. Finally, we construct a deep learning project as the comparative experiment. After comparing the results between deep learning model with TensorFlow deprecated APIs and without deprecated APIs, we conclude that using deprecated APIs will cause a 10% loss on efficiency and accuracy of deep learning model.

Solo: a lightweight static analysis for differential privacy

Existing approaches for statically enforcing differential privacy in higher order languages use either linear or relational refinement types. A barrier to adoption for these approaches is the lack of support for expressing these “fancy types” in mainstream programming languages. For example, no mainstream language supports relational refinement types, and although Rust and modern versions of Haskell both employ some linear typing techniques, they are inadequate for embedding enforcement of differential privacy, which requires “full” linear types. We propose a new type system that enforces differential privacy, avoids the use of linear and relational refinement types, and can be easily embedded in richly typed programming languages like Haskell. We demonstrate such an embedding in Haskell, demonstrate its expressiveness on case studies, and prove soundness of our type-based enforcement of differential privacy.

Revisiting Language Support for Generic Programming: When Genericity Is a Core Design Goal

Context: Generic programming, as defined by Stepanov, is a methodology for writing efficient and reusable algorithms by considering only the required properties of their underlying data types and operations. Generic programming has proven to be an effective means of constructing libraries of reusable software components in languages that support it. Generics-related language design choices play a major role in how conducive generic programming is in practice. Inquiry: Several mainstream programming languages (e.g. Java and C++) were first created without generics; features to support generic programming were added later, gradually. Much of the existing literature on supporting generic programming focuses thus on retrofitting generic programming into existing languages and identifying related implementation challenges. Is the programming experience significantly better, or different when programming with a language designed for generic programming without limitations from prior language design choices? Approach: We examine Magnolia, a language designed to embody generic programming. Magnolia is representative of an approach to language design rooted in algebraic specifications. We repeat a well-known experiment, where we put Magnolia's generic programming facilities under scrutiny by implementing a subset of the Boost Graph Library, and reflect on our development experience. Knowledge: We discover that the idioms identified as key features for supporting Stepanov-style generic programming in the previous studies and work on the topic do not tell a full story. We clarify which of them are more of a means to an end, rather than fundamental features for supporting generic programming. Based on the development experience with Magnolia, we identify variadics as an additional key feature for generic programming and point out limitations and challenges of genericity by property. Grounding: Our work uses a well-known framework for evaluating the generic programming facilities of a language from the literature to evaluate the algebraic approach through Magnolia, and we draw comparisons with well-known programming languages. Importance: This work gives a fresh perspective on generic programming, and clarifies what are fundamental language properties and their trade-offs when considering supporting Stepanov-style generic programming. The understanding of how to set the ground for generic programming will inform future language design.

Mutation testing of PL/SQL programs

Mutation testing is a prominent technique for evaluating the effectiveness of a test suite. Existing tools developed for supporting this technique are applicable for mainstream programming languages like C and Java. Mutation testing tools and mutation operators used by these tools are inherently language-specific. Moreover, there is a lack of industrial case studies for evaluating mutation testing tools and techniques in practice. In this article, we introduce muPLSQL, a tool for applying mutation testing on PL/SQL programs, facilitating automation for both mutant generation and test execution. We utilized existing mutation operators that are applicable for PL/SQL. In addition, we introduced some operators specifically for this language. We conducted an industrial case study for evaluating the applicability and usefulness of our tool and mutation testing in general. We applied mutation testing on a business support software system. muPLSQL generated a total of 5,939 mutants. The number of live mutants was 680. Manual inspection of live mutants led to improvements of the existing test suite. In addition, we found 8 faults in source code during the inspection process. Test execution against the mutants required around 40 h. The overall effort was almost one person month.

Two N-of-1 self-trials on readability differences between anonymous inner classes (AICs) and lambda expressions (LEs) on Java code snippets

In Java, lambda expressions (LEs) were introduced at a time where the similar language construct anonymous inner class (AIC) already existed for years. But while LEs became quite popular in mainstream programming languages in general, their usability is hardly studied. From the Java perspective the need to study the relationship between LEs and AICs was and is quite obvious, because both language constructs co-exist. However, it is quite usual that new language constructs are introduced although they are not or hardly studied using scientific methods – and an often heard argument from programming language designers is that the effort or the costs for the application of the scientific method on language constructs is too high. The present paper contributes in two different ways. First, with respect to LEs in comparison to AICs, this paper presents two N-of-1 studies (i.e. randomized control trials executed on a single subject) where LEs and AICs are used as listeners in Java code. Both experiments had two similar and rather simple tasks (“count the number of parameters”, respectively “count the number of used parameters”) with the dependent variable being reaction time. The first experiment used the number of parameters, the second the number of used parameters as the controlled, independent variable (in addition to the technique LE and AIC). Other variables (LOC, etc.) were randomly generated within given boundaries. The main result of both experiments is that LEs without type annotations require less reading time (p hs .2, reduction of reaction time of at most 35%). The results are based on 9,600 observations (one N-of-1 trial with eight replications). This gives evidence that the readability of LEs without type annotations improves the readability of code. However, the effect seems to be so small, that we do not expect this to have a larger impact on daily programming. Second, we see the contribution of this paper in the application of N-of-1 trials. Such experiments require relatively low effort in the data selection but still permit to analyze results in a non-subjective way using commonly accepted analysis techniques. Additionally, they permit to increase the number of selected data points in comparison to traditional multi–subject experiments. We think that researchers should take such experiments into account before planning and executing larger experiments.

Experience With Managing Technical Debt in Scientific Software Development Using the EXA2PRO Framework

Technical Debt (TD) is a software engineering metaphor that resembles the production of poor-quality code to going into debt. In particular, a development team that “ saves ” effort while developing by not removing inefficiencies, has to “ pay-back ” with interest, in the form of additional maintenance costs (i.e., fixing bugs, adding features, etc.) due to the poor maintainability of the developed code. Although maintainability assurance is an established practice in traditional software development (lately known as TD management), it has still not attracted the attention of scientific software developers; i.e., researchers writing code and developing tools for purely research purposes. Nevertheless, based on the literature and practice, maintainability seems to be ranked as an important key-driver for the development of such applications; since the effort needed to update the code before the experimentation (e.g., executing a simulation) is common and should not receive low priority. In this paper, we present the outcome of a 3-year research project on Technical Debt Management (TDM) for scientific software development. The outcome of the project is a framework (termed: EXA2PRO TDM framework) and an accompanying platform for assisting scientific software developers in managing the TD of their applications. The framework is a collection of methods tailored for the mainstream programming languages of scientific software development, which have been empirically validated through five pilot applications. The majority of the EXA2PRO framework suggestions have been applied by scientific software developers and eased future maintenance activities.

Myths and mythconceptions: what does it mean to be a programming language, anyhow?

Modern software does not stand alone; it is embedded in complex physical and sociotechnical systems. It relies on computational support from interdependent subsystems as well as non-code resources such as data, communications, sensors, and interactions with humans. Both general-purpose programming languages and mainstream programming language research focus on symbolic notations with well-defined abstractions that are intended for use by professionals to write programs that solve precisely specified problems. There is a strong emphasis on correctness of the resulting programs, preferably by formal reasoning. However, these languages, despite their careful design and formal foundations, address only a modest portion of modern software and only a minority of software developers. Several persistent myths reinforce this focus. These myths express an idealized model of software and software development. They provide a lens for examining modern software and software development practice: highly trained professionals are outnumbered by vernacular developers. Writing new code is dominated by composition of ill-specified software and non-software components. General-purpose languages may be less appropriate for a task than domain-specific languages, and functional correctness is often a less appropriate goal than overall fitness for task. Support for programming to meet a specification is of little help to people who are programming in order to understand their problems. Reasoning about software is challenged by uncertainty and nondeterminism in the execution environment and by the increasingly dominant role of data, especially with the advent of systems that rely on machine learning. The lens of our persistent myths illuminates the dissonance between our idealized view of software development and common practice, which enables us to identify emerging opportunities and challenges for programming language research.

Inferring ownership domains from refinements

Ownership type qualifiers clarify aliasing invariants that cannot be directly expressed in mainstream programming languages. Adding qualifiers to code, however, often involves significant overhead and difficult interaction. We propose an analysis to infer qualifiers in the code based on developer refinements that express strict encapsulation, logical containment and architectural tiers. Refinements include: <pre>makeOwnedBy</pre>, to make an object strictly encapsulated by another; <pre>makePartOf</pre>, to make an object logically contained in another; <pre>makePeer</pre>, to make two objects peers; <pre>makeParam</pre>, to make an object more accessible than the above choices; or <pre>makeShared</pre>, to allow an object to be globally aliased. If the code as-written matches the requested refinements, the analysis generates qualifiers that type-check; otherwise, it reports that the refinements do not match the code, so developers must investigate unexpected aliasing, change their understanding of the code and pick different refinements, or change the code and re-run the analysis. We implement the analysis and confirm that refinements generate precise qualifiers that express strict encapsulation, logical containment and architectural tiers.

Setup of a scientific computing environment for computational biology: Simulation of a genome-scale metabolic model of Escherichia coli as an example.

Computational analysis of biological data is becoming increasingly important, especially in this era of big data. Computational analysis of biological data allows efficiently deriving biological insights for given data, and sometimes even counterintuitive ones that may challenge the existing knowledge. Among experimental researchers without any prior exposure to computer programming, computational analysis of biological data has often been considered to be a task reserved for computational biologists. However, thanks to the increasing availability of user-friendly computational resources, experimental researchers can now easily access computational resources, including a scientific computing environment and packages necessary for data analysis. In this regard, we here describe the process of accessing Jupyter Notebook, the most popular Python coding environment, to conduct computational biology. Python is currently a mainstream programming language for biology and biotechnology. In particular, Anaconda and Google Colaboratory are introduced as two representative options to easily launch Jupyter Notebook. Finally, a Python package COBRApy is demonstrated as an example to simulate 1) specific growth rate of Escherichia coli as well as compounds consumed or generated under a minimal medium with glucose as a sole carbon source, and 2) theoretical production yield of succinic acid, an industrially important chemical, using E. coli. This protocol should serve as a guide for further extended computational analyses of biological data for experimental researchers without computational background.

Casting about in the dark: an empirical study of cast operations in Java programs

The main goal of a static type system is to prevent certain kinds of errors from happening at run time. A type system is formulated as a set of constraints that gives any expression or term in a program a well-defined type. Yet mainstream programming languages are endowed with type systems that provide the means to circumvent their constraints through casting. We want to understand how and when developers escape the static type system to use dynamic typing. We empirically study how casting is used by developers in more than seven thousand Java projects. We find that casts are widely used (8.7% of methods contain at least one cast) and that 50% of casts we inspected are not guarded locally to ensure against potential run-time errors. To help us better categorize use cases and thus understand how casts are used in practice, we identify 25 cast-usage patterns---recurrent programming idioms using casts to solve a specific issue. This knowledge can be: (a) a recommendation for current and future language designers to make informed decisions (b) a reference for tool builders, e.g., by providing more precise or new refactoring analyses, (c) a guide for researchers to test new language features, or to carry out controlled programming experiments, and (d) a guide for developers for better practices.

SciPipe—Turning Scientific Workflows into Computer Programs

By providing increased robustness to failure and reproducibility of results, workflows are an established workhorse of computer-aided science as well as an increasingly important part also in data pipelines in industry. For such complex and dynamic needs, we argue for the benefits of workflows implemented as computer programs, using workflow tools implemented as programming libraries. Furthermore, by using flow-based programming principles, a declarative while programmatic API can be presented, while still hiding a lot of low-level details under the hood. Being able to provide workflows in the form of compiled executable files has benefits both for the ease of deployment and future reproducibility. Workflow tool implementations are at risk for bit rot or incompatible changes well before the mainstream programming languages -or processor architectures -are.

Using ACL2 in the Design of Efficient, Verifiable Data Structures for High-Assurance Systems

Verification of algorithms and data structures utilized in modern autonomous and semi-autonomous vehicles for land, sea, air, and space presents a significant challenge. Autonomy algorithms, e.g., route planning, pattern matching, and inference, are based on complex data structures such as directed graphs and algebraic data types. Proof techniques for these data structures exist, but are oriented to unbounded, functional realizations, which are not typically efficient in either space or time. Autonomous systems designers, on the other hand, generally limit the space and time allocations for any given function, and require that algorithms deliver results within a finite time, or suffer a watchdog timeout. Furthermore, high-assurance design rules frown on dynamic memory allocation, preferring simple array-based data structure implementations. In order to provide efficient implementations of high-level data structures used in autonomous systems with the high assurance needed for accreditation, we have developed a verifying compilation technique that supports the "natural" functional proof style, but yet applies to more efficient data structure implementations. Our toolchain features code generation to mainstream programming languages, as well as GPU-based and hardware-based realizations. We base the Intermediate Verification Language for our toolchain upon higher-order logic; however, we have used ACL2 to develop our efficient yet verifiable data structure design. ACL2 is particularly well-suited for this work, with its sophisticated libraries for reasoning about aggregate data structures of arbitrary size, efficient execution of formal specifications, as well as its support for "single-threaded objects" -- functional datatypes with imperative "under the hood" implementations. In this paper, we detail our high-assurance data structure design approach, including examples in ACL2 of common algebraic data types implemented using this design approach, proofs of correctness for those data types carried out in ACL2, as well as sample ACL2 implementations of relevant algorithms utilizing these efficient, high-assurance data structures.

Detecting Binary Incompatible Software Components Using Dynamic Loader

Modern programming languages support modular development dividing the system into separate translation units and compile them individually. A linker is used then to assemble together these units either statically or dynamically. This process, however, introduces implicit dependences between the translation units. When one or more units are modified in inconsistent way binary incompatibility occurs and may result in unexpected program behavior. Current mainstream programming languages neither specify what are the binary compatibility rules nor provide tools to check them.In this paper we discuss the details of various cases of binary incompatibility. We implemented a prototype solution in the Welltype programming language to detect binary compatibility by dynamic loader.

Bounding data races in space and time

We propose a new semantics for shared-memory parallel programs that gives strong guarantees even in the presence of data races. Our local data race freedom property guarantees that all data-race-free portions of programs exhibit sequential semantics. We provide a straightforward operational semantics and an equivalent axiomatic model, and evaluate an implementation for the OCaml programming language. Our evaluation demonstrates that it is possible to balance a comprehensible memory model with a reasonable (no overhead on x86, ~0.6% on ARM) sequential performance trade-off in a mainstream programming language.