SuperContra: Cross-Language, Cross-Runtime Contracts as a Service

This paper presents SuperContra - a Design-by-Contract (DbC) framework that can ship with future PaaS offerings to enforce lightweight contracts across different programming systems, as-a-service. SuperContra is unique in that developers employ a familiar, high-level language to write contracts regardless of the programming language used to implement the component under test. We evaluate SuperContra using widely used, open-source software and compare its performance against existing DbC frameworks. Our results show that SuperContra performs on par with non-service-based DbC approaches and in some cases similarly to code running without contracts.