Cross-Language Code Analysis and Refactoring

Software composed of artifacts written in multiple (programming) languages is pervasive in today´s enterprise, desktop, and mobile applications. Since they form one system, artifacts from different languages reference one another, thus creating what we call semantic cross-language links. By their very nature, such links are out of scope of the individual programming language, they are ignored by most language-specific tools and are often only established -- and checked for errors -- at runtime. This is unfortunate since it requires additional testing, leads to brittle code, and lessens maintainability. In this paper, we advocate a generic approach to understanding, analyzing and refactoring cross-language code by explicitly specifying and exploiting semantic links with the aim of giving developers the same amount of control over and confidence in multi-language programs they have for single-language code today.