One tool, many languages: language-parametric transformation with incremental parametric syntax
Author(s)
Koppel, James; Premtoon, Varot; Solar Lezama, Armando
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We present a new approach for building source-to-source transformations that can run on multiple programming languages, based on a new way of representing programs called incremental parametric syntax. We implement this approach in Haskell in our Cubix system, and construct incremental parametric syntaxes for C, Java, JavaScript, Lua, and Python. We demonstrate a whole-program refactoring tool that runs on all of them, along with three smaller transformations that each run on several. Our evaluation shows that (1) once a transformation is written, little work is required to configure it for a new language (2) transformations built this way output readable code which preserve the structure of the original, according to participants in our human study, and (3) our transformations can still handle language corner-cases, as validated on compiler test suites.
Date issued
2018-10Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science; Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence LaboratoryJournal
Journal Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages
Publisher
Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
Citation
Koppel, James et al. "One tool, many languages: language-parametric transformation with incremental parametric syntax." Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages 2, OOPSLA (November 2018): 122 © 2018 Association of Computing Machinery
Version: Final published version
ISSN
2475-1421