An analysis of the dynamic behavior of JavaScript programs

Richards, Gregor; Lebresne, Sylvain; Burg, Brian R.; Vítek, Jan

doi:10.1145/1806596.1806598

Cited by 253 publications

(153 citation statements)

References 23 publications

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“…It is usually considered a best practice for specific tasks, such as loading scripts or data asynchronously. The authors also investigated a broad range of JavaScript dynamic features [RLBV10]. They concluded for example that libraries often change the prototype links dynamically, but such changes are restricted to built-in types, such as Object and Array, and changes in user-created types are more rare.…”

Section: Studies Using Dynamic Languagesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Architecture Conformance Checking in Dynamically Typed Languages.

Miranda¹,

Rodrigues²,

Valente³

et al. 2016

JOT

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Architectural erosion is a recurrent problem faced by software architects, which might be even more severe in systems implemented in dynamically typed languages. The reasons are twofold: (i) some features provided by such languages make developers more propitious to break the planned architecture (e.g., dynamic invocations and buildings), and (ii) the developers' community lacks tool support for monitoring the implemented architecture. To address these shortcomings, this paper presents an architectural conformance and visualization approach based on static code analysis techniques and on a lightweight type propagation heuristic. The central idea is to provide the developers' community with means to control the architectural erosion process by reporting architectural violations and visualizing them in high-level architectural models, such as reflexion models and DSMs. This paper also describes a tool-called ArchRuby-that implements our approach. We evaluate our solution in three real-world systems identifying 48 architectural violations of which the developers had no prior knowledge. We also measure the effectiveness of our type propagation heuristic reporting that (i) the number of analyzed types raises 5% on the average and (ii) certain violations are only detected due to our heuristic.

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Section: Studies Using Dynamic Languagesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Architecture Conformance Checking in Dynamically Typed Languages.

Miranda¹,

Rodrigues²,

Valente³

et al. 2016

JOT

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“…Richards et al [28,29] have explored how highly dynamic language features are used in JavaScript. They find such features, including eval, are used extensively in a wide variety of ways, including supporting metaprogramming.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Just-in-time static type checking for dynamic languages

Ren

Foster

2016

SIGPLAN Not.

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Dynamic languages such as Ruby, Python, and JavaScript have many compelling benefits, but the lack of static types means subtle errors can remain latent in code for a long time. While many researchers have developed various systems to bring some of the benefits of static types to dynamic languages, prior approaches have trouble dealing with metaprogramming, which generates code as the program executes. In this paper, we propose Hummingbird, a new system that uses a novel technique, just-in-time static type checking, to type check Ruby code even in the presence of metaprogramming. In Hummingbird, method type signatures are gathered dynamically at run-time, as those methods are created. When a method is called, Hummingbird statically type checks the method body against current type signatures. Thus, Hummingbird provides thorough static checks on a per-method basis, while also allowing arbitrarily complex metaprogramming. For performance, Hummingbird memoizes the static type checking pass, invalidating cached checks only if necessary. We formalize Hummingbird using a core, Ruby-like language and prove it sound. To evaluate Hummingbird, we applied it to six apps, including three that use Ruby on Rails, a powerful framework that relies heavily on metaprogramming. We found that all apps typecheck successfully using Hummingbird, and that Hummingbird's performance overhead is reasonable. We applied Hummingbird to earlier versions of one Rails app and found several type errors that had been introduced and then fixed. Lastly, we demonstrate using Hummingbird in Rails development mode to typecheck an app as live updates are applied to it.

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“…In recent years, many researchers have conducted studies about the static analysis of JavaScript code, mainly based on assumptions that, as shown by Richards et al [32], are actually often being violated by the code written by programmers: JavaScript is described by Richards as ''a harsh terrain for static analysis. ''…”

Section: Validation Of Dynamic Web Pagesmentioning

confidence: 99%